'Machinal' rages against the modern machine

Living in a mechanical world with irritating, robotic people is suffocating. Watching it can be pretty grueling, too. Not that playwright Sophie Treadwell's expressionist piece, Machinal, gives the actors an easy time, either—it is the type of atmospheric stage art that virtually demands a high-budget production. Based on a trial that Treadwell once covered as a journalist during the 1920s, the play stars a young woman whose character is reminiscent of Ruth Snyder, the first woman to die in the electric chair. Despite the inherent intrigue of a murder and a style that mimics the methodical haunt of Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, the script does not seem able to carry itself when stripped down to its essentials. Without impressive visual effects to mesmerize an audience with the claustrophobic nightmare world of the protagonist, this production is ultimately left to drone on under the bare bulb of uninteresting, repetitious dialogue.

DAVID GEST/YH A woman needs a man like a fish needs an iMac.

For this reason, Treadwell's play is perhaps not the best choice for the limited means of Ashley Lucas', MC '01, senior project in the adapted gym of the Whitney Humanities Center. However, the cast makes the best of its available lighting and sound devices as it strives to artistically represent an eerie world dominated by men, machines, and oppressive drudgery. It's the kind of society that forces women like the protagonist to submit themselves to dispiriting jobs, unhappy marriages, and unfulfilling lives.

At the onset of the play, when the audience's attention has not yet descended into the dreary realm of lost causes, Lucas is captivating as the young woman. Her facial expressions are versatile and well-timed, and during frequent monologues the audience is kept abreast of her mood shifts as she flips from dreamy dazes to outbreaks of anxiety. Unfortunately, as the scenes progress and Lucas' character remains fixed in a fairly constant, frenzied exasperation against a host of monotonously repetitive characters, the audience begins to share her sentiments a bit too literally.

Again, this is largely the fault of the dialogue. Stripped of atmosphere by a bare-bones set and lighting scheme, a conversation such as: "Breath is life. And life is breath." "Then what is death?" "Just no breath." "All right?" "All right" to the background thud of machine noises becomes uninspiring rather quickly. One more engaging exchange, however, appears early in the play between the young woman and her mother (Sivan Nasoff, SOM '01). The quintessential nagger in frumpy housedress, Nasoff plays her character's pleasant admonishments ("Aren't you going to finish your potato?") wittily against her daughter's edgy panic to create an amusing clash. Some of the nonsensical lines delivered by the young woman's husband (George Sidjimkvov, SOM '01), are also humorous, at least the first time that they are spoken. Interest revives later in the play when the dramatic style suddenly shifts to a more naturalistic tone and the young woman flirts with her future lover (Benjamin Marcovitz, TC '02) in a bar. While there is a breath of fresh air and enchantment in their early seduction, the ensuing love scene stretches on too long with too little development, and thus, as in other scenes, the animation dissolves.

Like drawing out a scene, repetition rapidly exhausts itself as a dramatic tool when there is also no significant change in character or situation. Because her character lacks a psychological transformation, Lucas seems unable to justify the lack of change in the dialogue and actions of the robotic characters that surround her. Perhaps if the play's direction had sculpted the young woman's character with a tighter grasp of sanity and control at the beginning of the play, her subsequent fall into drastic, desperate measures would have been more compelling.

Theater

Machinal By Sophie Treadwell Directed by Nadine George Fri., Nov. 10 at 7 and 10 p.m. Sat., Nov. 11 at 8 p.m. Whitney Humanities Center $2

An additional difficulty is that—like many lines of its script—one of the principal themes in Machinal was once historically poignant but has since largely spent itself. While the "modern neurotic women" fighting the tide of oppressive gender expectations is certainly no new concept in the era of the less threatening Ally McBeal, when Machinal was written in 1928 such a statement about societal oppression surely had more impact simply out of its relative uniqueness.

While it is unfortunate that the ominous spell of Treadwell's script did not hold up more effectively in this staging, it is surely not by lack of effort or talent in the cast. Ironically, what seems to be most lacking here are engineering and lighting effects: an expressionist play whose atmosphere focuses so fixedly on machinery would have benefited from a bit more of it in production.

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