Rebecca Hall (photo: Joan Marcus)It isn’t very likely that Broadway audiences would see a revival of Sophie Treadwell’s (1885 – 1970) multi-character-many-scenes melodramatic expressionistic 1928 play “Machinal” if it were not for the resources of a non-profit theater as is the Roundabout Theatre Company. British director Lindsey Turner is the guiding force behind this spectacularly staged production that features more set changes than do many musicals as well as accommodating a cast of seventeen. Tragic in its scope and demanding in presentation, “Machinal” remains a seminal and specific look at the repression and the retaliation of a vulnerable woman.
Except for the Off-Broadway revival directed by a young Michael Grief for the Public Theater in 1990 (remembered by me at the time as a revelation), “Machinal” (pronounced on the current radio ads as “Mashinal” and in print as “Mock-en-all”) is a stunning evocation of the downward spiraling of an emotionally fragile woman victimized by the life she led and by the circumstances that make her feel it is intolerable.
Not a very pretty picture to frame within lots of highly stylized prose, but Treadwell, who is renowned as one of America’s most prominent playwrights of the first half of the twentieth century, used the very real and shocking Snyder-Gray suburban murder trial of the era as the basis for her riveting play. In it, we see how the indiscretion of a “young woman” (Rebecca Hall), becomes the catalyst to her (not a spoiler) death in the electric chair.
Hall, who is making her Broadway debut after a notable career on the London stage, is unnervingly brilliant as the young conflicted wife and mother who feels trapped and desperate having to live in a constant state of anxiety and despair. We observe her from the very beginning at her wits end escaping from the crush of subway riders, then coping with routine in the shadow of her hovering, needy mother (Suzanne Bertish) and later marking time in the light of an unhappy marriage to her boss (Michael Cumpsty). This union, however, never fully reveals the cause of her pervasive unrest.
What prompts the woman’s increasingly hyper-neurotic behavior and what eventually triggers the psychotic act that will determine her fate are aspects of her personality that are threaded through the play like the accumulation of clues in a mystery. The play segues engrossingly from the beginning where the “Young Woman” appears to be not only overwhelmed by the mechanized and dehumanizing office work, (shades of Elmer Rice’s “The Adding Machine”) but also by the evidently sincere if mechanically romantic attention of her cold, no-nonsense boss. Cumpsty, as he recently did with his splendid performance in the Roundabout’s production of “The Winslow Boy,” affirms his stature as one of our most admirably versatile actors as the clueless “Husband.”
An impulsive and reckless decision to have an affair with a handsome, transient she picks up in a bar provides us with a different perspective of the woman. It is the scene in his hotel room in which we can see her beginning to become aware of her own power and to also feel an identity that has been kept under wraps. Morgan Spector is excellent as the accommodating lover who is both baffled and amused by her.
It is the heightened internal feminine perspective that is exposed and considered so atypical in its time.
At first, the calculated cadence of the speech as well as the mechanical order of daily life takes on a feeling of science-fiction, but it soon evolves into a kind of purist naturalism. The final scenes are a bit of a drudge as the trial segues slowly to the moment of execution, but we are never out of the grip of a melodrama that spoke to its age even as it continues to be a voice for the repressed of all ages.
There is great theatricality in the physical production as devised by set designer Es Devlin whose turntable becomes a remarkable vehicle, under the atmospheric lighting by Jane Cox, for a large cast to traverse through the plays’ nine episodes and multiple locations. Like the play, it is a triumph of execution with no pun intended.
“Machinal” (through March 2, 2014) (Tickets are available by calling 212.719.1300, online at www.roundabouttheatre.org or at the American Airlines Box Office (227 West 42nd Street). Tickets prices range from $52-$127.00.
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