Machinal

Machinal (1928), a play by Sophie Treadwell. [Plymouth Theatre, 91 perf.] A stenographer, simply identified as Young Woman ( Zita Johann), is a cog in the machinery at the Jones Company. In her desperate search to find “somebody” to love her, she takes as a Husband ( George Stillwell) a vacuous man who brings her neither change nor real love. After her marriage she meets a Young Man ( Hal K. Dawson) and believes she has finally found relief from the unthinking sameness around her. She asks her husband to release her, but he refuses, so she kills him. The Woman is tried, convicted, and executed. As she dies she cries out for “somebody.” The staccato dialogue and rapidly changing scenes were played out against Robert Edmond Jones's expressionistic settings. Brooks Atkinson wrote of the Arthur Hopkins production, “Subdued, monotonous, episodic, occasionally eccentric, ‘Machinal’ is fraught with a beauty unfamiliar to the stage.” The play was revived Off Broadway in 1960 and 1990, the second production being praised highly. The California‐born Sophie TREADWELL (1890–1970) had been an actress and protégé of Helena Modjeska before attempting to write plays. Half a dozen of her works reached Broadway, including Gringo (1922), Plumes in the Dust (1936), and Hope for a Harvest (1941), but Machinal was her only success. Biography: Sophie Treadwell: The Career of a 20th Century American Feminist, N. Wynn, 1982.