CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

Misery, murder and 'Machinal'

The Hypocrites' stunning revival of Sophie Treadwell's play, Machinal, is the first theatrical event of the new year, and it immediately raises the bar of achievement for the season to come to an exceptionally high level.

But it is Moe, a petite woman with a face that is alternately tensely angular and innocently sweet-- and body language that seems capable of shifting on a dime--who will mesmerize you. This is a performance that seamlessly blends high stylization with nerve-deep realism. It leaves you wondering, as Treadwell's play does, whether you are watching a character who is mentally ill or impossibly healthy in a sick and suffocating world. Small wonder you may leave the theater at once shaken and strangely liberated.

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CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Hypocrites produces intriguing 'Machinal'

By Michael Phillips (posted online January 5, 2003)

In her journalist days, Sophie Treadwell interviewed Pancho Villa in Mexico when no one else was interviewing Pancho Villa in Mexico. She hung out in New York with everyone from actress Katherine Cornell to artiste Marcel Duchamp. She covered murder on a grand scale (World War I) and murder on the domestic scale, notably the 1927 Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray trial in which a Queens homemaker and her corset-salesman lover were executed for killing Snyder's husband.

The following year Treadwell wrote Machinal. No straightforward account of the trial, the play was instead a kind of theatrical X-ray, revealing the bones beneath the damp skin of all the Snyder newspaper accounts. In Treadwell's play — not her first, but still her best-known — the machine is society; the victim, a woman, has no recourse other than to submit to its patriarchal will.

Now at Chicago Dramatists, the Hypocrites gang has ushered in the year with an intriguing revival.

Mechelle Moe plays Helen, the ill-fated stenographer. She looks like a D.W. Griffith orphan who has endured her share of storms. Treadwell's protagonist lives in a cramped apartment with a harridan of a mother (Shawn Yardley). Helen marries her Babbitt of a boss (Kurt Ehrmann, especially good in high-panic mode) but it's an airless existence. She finds solace in an affair with an adventurer (Ryan Bollettino, in a role originated on Broadway by Clark Gable). Helen kills her husband; she goes to court; in the final moments, a literal machine, an electric chair, does her in while a priest mutters words of Christian comfort.

Treadwell drew on the theatrical language of Expressionism and a visual vocabulary inspired by the movies. (King Vidor's The Crowd, which also came out in 1928, managed to capture in a single shot — the swoop over the endless rows and rows of corporate drones at their desks — what many a '20s playwright struggled to convey in an entire work.) Machinal was, and is, a savvy feminist critique of the Jazz Age itself, which may have been all about liquor and ha-cha, but left an awful lot of people stuck between two worlds: Victorian morality and paradoxical Prohibition-era freedom.

The Hypocrites rendition, oddly, is most effective when most real. The key scene between Moe and Bollettino, a morning-after bedroom conversation, works wonderfully well. The physical production features video projections depicting black-and-white shots of waves, and lab mice under duress, backed by a taped keyboard score atop which we hear a live cello. The music, alas, is more narcotic than mesmeric.

The best performances compensate. Moe's minimalist approach pays off when she suddenly changes gears in a surprising late scene with Ehrmann, suffering what can only be called a full-on Expressionist attack: She chokes, while we hear a piercing high-pitched electronic eeeeeeeeeeeee and the stage goes red. It's director Sean Graney's best-realized flourish. As a filing clerk John Byrnes, fast and funny, does wonders with the catch-phrase hot dog!

Looking back at 1920s Broadway, it's remarkable that everyone from Elmer Rice (The Adding Machine) to Eugene O'Neill (The Hairy Ape) to Sophie Treadwell were trafficking in such exotic theatrical styles. Manhattan was full of theater-goers who were also hot for this new thing called psychoanalysis, and a play like Machinal — to read it as superficially as possible — explained one woman's behavior by illustrating the deck stacked against her happiness.

It ran only 91 performances, and it fell out of circulation for decades. But Machinal remains a key Jazz Age artifact. The Hypocrites' staging, however uneven, helps explain why some artifacts stay buried, while others live on.

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MACHINAL, The Hypocrites at Chicago Dramatists

BY LUCIA MAURO   (posted online on January 7, 2003)

Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 Industrial Era metaphor on dehumanization, Machinal, could easily be presented as a glaring automaton cliché. But in director Sean Graney’s engrossingly immediate production for The Hypocrites at Chicago Dramatists, this Expressionist-style drama inspires a small miracle: the robotic vacancy of these characters swept into a cold assembly-line world serves as a portal into their stunted humanity.

Graney strips down and broadens these iconic figures (the embittered mother, insecure older husband, free-spirited lover/revolutionary, etc.) to lay bare the disturbing fiber of social expectation. A morality tale -- with Brechtian overtones and executed in the grotesque timbre of Leonide Massine’s ballet finale in the film, The Red Shoes, or Ruth Page’s Frankie and Johnny – The Hypocrites’ vision of Machinal de-romanticizes romantic love at the same time it blissfully re-defines true love in a world devoid of emotion.

This paradoxical give-and-take makes this production so intense and visceral. Each scene – introduced on grungy panels with Michael Corrigan’s Depression-era film clips that encompass lab rats and starving-eyed children – crackles with melancholic repression, whose hopelessness is enhanced by an understated absurdist humor.

Machinal, inspired by the real 1927 trial of Ruth Snyder – a secretary accused of murdering her husband (a case the playwright covered as a reporter) – unfolds over nine cradle-to-grave-like episodes. A Young Woman works as a stenographer at a nameless urban office and unwittingly attracts the amorous attention of her older boss, whom she reluctantly marries. Poor and forced to live in a one-room flat with her callous mother, the Young Woman can only hope for a secure life with an established man like her boss (with whom she will waste away in a loveless marriage).

Her most prized possession, her well-manicured hands, help to move her into a higher income bracket yet, later, they become her most vicious weapons.

The terror of Machinal lay in its mundane, almost trivial, structure and progression. We witness a less-than-idyllic honeymoon in a nondescript hotel, with the Young Woman flinching at every ego-deflating touch of her Husband. The scene in the hospital following the birth of her daughter dares to show a mother sickened and demoralized by her new role.

Then the Young Woman discovers – in a speakeasy – what she believes to be true, indefinable love with her Lover – a Revolutionary headed for adventures below the Rio Grande. The rest of this dramatic diorama traverses the Young Woman and her Husband’s suffocating detachment, then the Young Woman’s trial for murdering her spouse while he slept. It culminates in her execution.

But, more than seeking justification for the woman’s murder, Machinal examines the little boxes into which conventional society places its infinitely malleable individuals. Those unspoken rituals – from marriage to motherhood – can be either beatific realms of fulfillment or brutal sensory-deprivation cells, depending on the circumstances surrounding those choices (including lack of choice).

The playwright Treadwell surgically dissects the very institutions meant to hold a society together, and the invasive procedure reveals some of the more cancerous aspects of those rigid rules and regulations. This is an image Graney subtly unveils through his exacting and all-encompassing production elements.

His scenic design features rusty revolving fans built into the wall and corroded, disembodied blinds – mesmerizing in their macabre vintage beauty, especially as lit in a greenish patina by Heather Graff and Rich Peterson. Alison Siple’s exaggerated color-coded costumes (particularly the matador-esque reds and blacks of the opening scene) place us in an alternate Techni-Color/sepia universe, where pop-culture images and familiar snippets of an era collide.

But the most haunting design touch is Joseph Fosco’s David Lynch-like sound design: the ever-present drone of machine parts; the maddening rattle of a jackhammer; an indefinable and ineffable clanging – all accentuated by cellist Nicole LeGette’s eerie, unstoppable live playing.

The design effectively merges with the actors – a deeply committed cast capable of releasing the shards of genuine feeling caught in the cogs of their automaton characters. Mechelle Moe as the beleaguered Young Woman delivers perhaps the most searing and soul-felt performance of her career. On the verge of hyperventilating, and struggling to infuse a spirit into her vacant stares, she becomes a distressing tangle of pent-up heaves and fragile child-like wonder – evoked most stingingly in the methodical flattening of her hair.

Kurt Ehrmann, who seems to have found his creative groove with The Hypocrites, tackles the potentially one-dimensional role of the Husband with an immovable yet heartbreaking sympathy. He, too, is a victim of a heartless system. Shawn Yardley also masterfully chips away at the Mother’s damaged self-pride; Halena Kays radiates a devious glow as the wanton Telephone Girl; Amanda Putman demonstrates a swift agility in multiple roles; and Tom Bateman is cuttingly unforgiving as the Lawyer for the Prosecution.

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CHICAGO READER

Stunning Restoration
a selection of Jack Helbig's Reader review

by JACK HELBIG (published January 10th, 2003)

"...One of Chicago's most talented [directors] is Sean Graney, who has an uncanny ability to dust off shows considered daring a  generation or two ago and make them seem shocking and new again. Last season his lively, funny version of Eugene Ionesco's 1959 absurdist drama Rhinoceros made me realize there's more to this play than the rather obvious comic allegory. And Graney's production of Federico Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding gave me a new appreciation for the emotional radicalism of this playwright's opaque dreamscapes."

"Tackling Sophie Treadwell's expressionist drama Machinal for The Hypocrites, Graney once again proves equal to the task of lifelike embalming. Together with an army of collaborators - including filmmaker Michael Corrigan, composer Kevin O'Donnell, sound designer Joseph Fosco, and cello player Nicole LeGett - he's done a fabulous job of making the play seem as relevant today as when it opened on Broadway 75 years ago. And that's saying a lot, because even three generations ago theater was more alive than it is today. It seems remarkable now that such an experimental work could have been produced on America's most visible theatrical street at all: each of the play's nine discreet scenes has a different tone, and the language and story are intentionally fragmented."

"In this protofeminist, protoexistential work, a woman trapped in a loveless marriage turns to murder to escape. Combining the themes of the treatment of women in American culture and the loss of individuality in an increasingly mechanized society, Treadwell blends the techniques of German expressionism and American naturalism in the style of her playwriting contemporaries, especially Eugene O'Neill in Strange Interlude and Elmer Rice in The Adding Machine. And Treadwell's arguments against capital punishment hit hard at a time when execution-happy conservatives are still pushing to control the judicial system..."

"...The milieu of the play - lower-middle-class America in the 1920's - is familiar. And it's one mark of Graney's brilliance as a director that he uses our knowledge of the setting to full advantage. We've seen the dreary world of Treadwell's protagonist before: the nine-to-five prison of clerical work, the bare apartment with paper-thin walls, the toxic relationships based more on need than love. Acting as set designer as well as director, Graney implies even more with the addition of a prop or two, sometimes intentionally anachronistic. The tiny beat-up television that sits in the middle of a rickety kitchen tells us all we need to know about our heroine's restricted worldview and nearly empty bank account. Corrigan's montages of images from the 20s and 30s intercut with more contemporary shots in factories and along the Chicago lakefront serve a similar purpose,m providing historical context and, in some cases, the emotional tone missing from Treadwell's intentionally spare script."

"In this production, as in Graney's other stagings, his greatest asset is the ability to coax first-rate performances from [his] cast. Those who have seen Mechelle Moe's fine...work in past Hypocrites shows will not be prepared for the intense, multilayered performance she delivers as the young woman. From the moment she enters - a drooping, beaten-down office drudge - she's utterly fascinating. Later, after she's facedone setback after another - dull marriage, faithless lover, kangaroo-court trial - she rises up, wronged by the world and angry. Moe's performance in the final scene is one of the most riveting I've seen this season."

"In fact Graney's tight, disciplined ensemble adeptly negotiates every line of Treadwell's poetic dialogue and all the twists in her sometimes difficult script. Machinal is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, coolly distant and violently intense. These actors can field everything Treadwell can throw at them..."

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LERNER NEWS-STAR

Stunning drama explores
path to murder
(a selection from Beverly Friend's Lerner review)

by Beverly Friend (published January 8, 2003)

"In nine images filled arresting images, Sophie Treadwell's stunning 1928 drama, Machinal, develops and explores the psyche of a fragile young woman trapped in a bare and banal life - a dead-end job, a dependent parent and a repellent marriage - who ultimately murders her husband..."

"...Kudos to [director]/set designer Sean Graney for creating the varied world of each taut episode."

"To Business provides an extraordinary opening, an office filled with a cacophony of sound. Phones ring, typewriters clack, and the staff - Telephone Girl (Halena Kays), Stenographer (Amanda Putman), Adding Clerk (Carmen Aiello) and Filing Clerk (John Byrnes) - engage in a fascinating display of repetitious, rapid-fire speech. The staccato delivery and expert timing emphasize the dehumanizing effect of the workplace. Helen, dressed in contrast to the bright red garb of her fellow workers, arrives late, apprehensive about her job, and even more worried about the romantic intent of a marriage-minded boss (Kurt Ehrmann) 30 years her senior..."

"...Throughout, Moe performs wonderfully in a tortured role evolving through a sequence of urban nightmares: from worker and daughter to wife, mother, adulteress and murderer. She's especially effective delivering long, complex, paranoid, interior monologues revealing her anguish. Like the filmed flower shown blossoming on the metal screen between scenes, she unfolds beautifully in Intimate, when she finds her only - too brief - experience of happiness with her lover. In a life of continual indignity, where she's forced to submit - to marriage, to motherhood, to the electric chair - Moe brings radiance to her character in this vivid episode."

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WINDY CITY TIMES

'MACHINAL' by Mary Shen Barnidge

Actress Mechelle Moe has a soft, almost babylike, face—not the classical features we usually associate with High Tragedy. Certainly a visage unlikely to make her the first choice for a heroine required to suffer horribly in, literally, eight scenes out of nine. But in the course of her portrayal of a humble woman trapped by a merciless society, an array of expressions as vivid and varied as a gallery of Greek masks impose themselves on Moe’s countenance until, by the final moments, we desperately turn our eyes elsewhere, fearing to look upon such excruciation as that which besets her character, lest our emotional response exceed the limits permitted by aesthetic distance.

She doesn’t do it all by herself, of course. Author Sophie Treadwell pulls no punches in her depiction of a humble office dronette forced by family obligations to marry a man she loathes and later murders in a burst of liberative passion. Treadwell, herself a journalist and war correspondent, reveals the poignant cruelty lurking beneath the so-called “roaring twenties” (in a crowded speakeasy, a young woman is pressured by her boyfriend to have an abortion, and a homosexual male courts a young hustler—all pretty lurid stuff in 1928).

Sean Graney’s direction likewise reflects the turmoil of the play’s protagonist. Her environment is a swarm of frenzied activity, and her manic soliloquies as adrenally abbreviated as a Kenneth Fearing poem. These sensory fusillades serve to intensify the play’s few intimate moments—her tryst with a mercenary soldier who tells of once using a bottle filled with rocks to kill his captor, and her later contemplation of her husband and the gravel in a potted houseplant. Joe Fosco’s meticulous arrangement of Kevin O’Donnel’s seamless original score, much of it performed live by cellist Nicole LeGette, heightens our empathy even as Michael Corrigan’s cinematic sequences dilute it. Kurt Ehrmann lends a piscine repugnance to the role of Our Girl’s soul-suffocating husband, Ryan Bollettino makes an unexpectedly romantic Soldier-Of-Fortune, and Shawn Yardley makes a case for the mother whose care necessitates her daughter’s servitude. But Moe’s riveting performance is itself reason enough to make the lonely trek to Chicago Dramatists.

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'MACHINAL'

by Jeff Rossen (published January 15, 2003)

Love makes us do strange things. The absence of love can make us do things even more desperate, like partnering with a person who we don't love, maybe even don't like all that much, just to escape being alone. It's not a case of confusing the state of being in love with simply being in love with being in love; it's being so sure that you'll never find true love that you're willing to settle for something else. Something less. Someone who at least loves you, even though the touch of his hand makes your skin crawl.

That's what Helen does when her boss proposes marriage to his office steno. With an overbearing yet dependent mother to support, a woman who's told Helen all her life how worthless she is, Helen sees George Jones' position and bank account as a way to escape at least one suffocating existence, even if it means entering another one.

In Sophie Treadwell's 1928 tragedy, it's hard to tell whether Helen is merely overwhelmed by her life or has had her mind shattered by it. And when she makes the most horrific of choices to alter her future when she finds that she does indeed have the capacity to love in return, that question cloaks her like a death shroud. And it does so with hypnotic intensity in Mechelle Moe's soul-lacerating and ravenous performance as Helen. No doubt about it: This is the performance of the season. Yes, we've seen actors in habit their characters with intensity before, but Moe peels back the flesh as she exposes Helen's every prick of fear, twinge of hate, chill of despair. It is a painful, exhilarating, anguishing and mesmerizing work of passion at the core of a fiercely produced and impressively gritty triumph.

Moe is guided through Helen's torment by the quirky eyes and ears, and confident hand of director Sean Graney, who sets the pitch so high at first that one is afraid there will be nowhere to go from that height. But with Moe in the center of a crisp and adaptable ensemble (with especially solid and creepy power coming from Kurt Ehrmann as Jones) that is willing and, more importantly, able to bring Graney's stylized vision to life, the Hypocrites' Machinal (the title being a word devised by Treadwell to represent how Helen has been deadened, squeezed, crushed by the machine-like quality of life surrounding her) begins with as a fevered cacophony and stays there throughout its two hours, resting only slightly when Helen meets a man who will open her eyes to the possibilities she's been blind to.

Joseph Fosco's impeccable sound design blends recorded sounds with live effects, and Kevin O'Donnel's original music (performed live by cellist Nicole LeGette) adds an compelling atmosphere. The stark setting conceived by Graney is properly dinged by Heather Graff and Rich Peterson's finely focused lighting, while Alison Simpson's black-and-white-and-red costumes (with the exception of Helen's dark blue dress) complement the visual style. Each of the drama's nine segments are introduced and segued between by a sometimes disturbing, sometimes humorous but always fascinating film sequence devised by Michael Corrigan.

Machinal may be 75 years old, but it is as timely and disquieting as any modern work. Maybe even more so; things haven't really changed much, have they? (* * * *)

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Liberty Suburban Chicago Newspapers

Machinal - A timely, riveting drama

By Catey Sullivan (published January 13, 2003)

In Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, the audience doesn't see the mental snap that catapults the heroine into a state of absolute  isolation. Such a scene isn't necessary .The tension throughout the play crackles with the convulsive intensity of live wires in water.

Treadwell's play is loosely based on the 1927 execution by electrocution of suburban housewife Ruth Snyder, and the events that led to her becoming the first woman to die in the electric chair in this country. From the first violent twitch in this drama, it's starkly apparent that the end will come with ashes. The world on this stage is a bleak one, and one that is difficult to look away from in a riveting production directed by Sean Graney for the Hypocrites theater company.

Like an execution, Machinal offers no visible redemption. With former Gov. George Ryan's blanket pardon of death row inmates on Saturday, Machinal takes on an intense, uncanny resonance. Lives are not spared in Machinal, only crushed, thoughtlessly and inevitably. Treadwell's depiction of the world is pitiless and harsh: People are born alone, they die alone and they are profoundly alone most of the time in between. For the modern woman of the patriarchal, post-industrial era Treadwell paints in Machinal, loneliness is cruelly compounded by suffocating oppression. It would be comforting to think of Treadwell's piece strictly as a cautionary tale or an allegory, but that's not entirely possible. There are too many real-life examples people who fall through the cracks and into an abyss where they fester until they rupture with rage.

Written in 1929, Machinal is expressionistic rather than strictly realistic. If it was a painting, it would pop with rough textures and sharp angles made from jabbing, jagged brush strokes. Graney has instilled the play with an aptly nightmarish quality - everything from a trio of ringing telephones to a pair of red socks seems enveloped by hazy, surreal malignancy. Events unfold in nine uneasy episodes that show the stifling life of a Young Woman (Mechelle Moe).

In "To Business'', she's in an office where co-workers speak in clipped, repetitive fragments and the talk is uniformly banal, petty and wounding. "At Home'', she cares for a corrosively embittered mother. Desperate for some form of escape, the Young Woman eventually marries her boss (Kurt Ehrmann), although she finds him repulsive ("The Honeymoon''). She has a baby ("Maternal'') that she doesn't want, and in "Intimate,'' the drama's solitary, salving scene - takes on a lover. The role of the Young Woman is extremely strenuous, and Moe goes full throttle with it, giving an exhausting performance in which despair, alienation and confusion seem to howl from every pore in her body.

The scenes are masterfully punctuated by the work of filmmaker Michael Corrigan, whose video unspools on screens in a spooky, flickering parade. Corrigan's images are of children standing alone; conveyor belts processing milk cartons are stacked to infinity and larva writhing in an eyeless mass. There are tumbling ocean waves, white noise and television static; people in blindfolds and people in nooses. All of these disparate, grainy black-and-white scenes heighten the sense of a world that is cold, compassionless, vast and dangerous. The video and the live action benefit from Joe Fosco's eerie sound design and a live cellist (Nicole LeGette), who unreels a muted strand of original music (Kevin O'Donnel) throughout the drama.

Machinal begins with the whir and ring of telephones, adding machines and typewriters. It ends with an image of a far more lethal piece of machinery, the electric chair. But it would be a mistake to classify Machinal as an anti- death penalty screed or a scathing commentary on the oppression of women. It is an acutely drawn map of the links between grinding conformity, alienation, still-born dreams and desperation.

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