Machinal E-Book

Sophie Treadwell

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Classic Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 126

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

'Your skin oughtn't to curl – ought it – when he just comes near you – ought it? That's wrong, ain't it? You don't get over that, do you – ever, do you or do you?' The city. A woman is restless. A woman is suffocating. A woman is silenced. The woman revolts. A visceral expressionist masterpiece, Sophie Treadwell's play Machinal was first seen on Broadway in 1928, in London in 1930, and was later revived in the 1990s. This edition was published alongside the 2018 production at the Almeida Theatre, London, directed by Natalie Abrahami.

Leseprobe

Sophie Treadwell

MACHINAL

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Original Production

Introduction

Characters and Episodes

Notes on the Play

Episode I

Episode II

Episode III

Episode IV

Episode V

Episode VI

Episode VII

Episode VIII

Episode IX

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

ForewordRupert Goold

When Sophie Treadwell wrote Machinal in 1928 she revealed a culture not so different from our own – the New York she depicts is an engine, racing forwards at a pace that cannot be sustainable. Though she didn’t know it at the time, within months of Machinal opening, the stock markets would crash, and the US would plunge into the worst depression in its history. ‘Profits – give me profits!’ bellows a manager at his overworked employees in an early draft of the play’s opening scene, before sliding his hand around a young female typist who flinches, knowing she will lose her job if she speaks up.

Ninety years after it emerged from the American expressionist theatre scene, and twenty-five years since its last London production, Machinal remains strikingly resonant in its depiction of oppression, gender and power. Often this power is exerted through the modern city’s alienating effect. The play repeatedly dramatises environments of isolation and failed communication – office workers drowning in information without meaning, families where generations exist in different worlds, romantic relationships built on lies, and civic institutions more interested in process than individuals. Treadwell reveals how the patriarchal and capitalist structures which define the way we live our lives prevent us from ever being able to live freely

In each of the play’s nine jagged scenes, the urban machine intervenes to prevent meaningful communication. Part of Sophie Treadwell’s radicalism is that Machinal doesn’t only depict this society at work, but shows us a woman questioning the status quo and finding agency within it. And yet, by the end of the play the Young Woman finds herself desperate to say more than even this story has allowed. Treadwell seems to be insisting that in order for us to progress, we must speak candidly, and in particular, we must allow women’s voices to lead the conversations about their own lives.

This revival of Machinal at the Almeida Theatre follows on from the premiere of Ella Hickson’s The Writer, a contemporary play about a female writer trying to change the shape of the world. These playwrights are speaking to each other across the water and across the ages, galvanising the next generation to question the world they inherit and inspiring them to effect change. The Young Woman in Machinal ends the play insisting ‘I have so much left to tell’, determined to talk to ‘somebody’. She is calling, in her final moments, to begin a conversation with us. And in order to continue this dialogue and this fight for women’s voices to be listened to, we must participate, by staging, viewing, and reading Treadwell’s work, letting it fuel the conversations we carry into our lives when we leave the theatre.

Turning to the major histories and biographies of twentieth-century drama there are reams written about Sophie Treadwell’s male contemporaries, but she herself rarely gets more than a line’s mention. Much is often made of the play’s expressionist style but in a way that denies the fact that Machinal also involves a deep psychological engagement with the Young Woman at its centre. Treadwell understood the popular theatre of her time and produced a play that she knew was thrilling and scandalous enough to carry her radical ideas to as wide a popular audience as possible. The theatrical form she pioneered as a result makes her arguably one of the most significant American dramatists of the twentieth century. With her formal experimentation and elliptical dialogue, Treadwell is a forerunner of Samuel Beckett; with her critique of the cruelty of the modern city Treadwell precedes David Mamet; and with her exploration of sexual, medical and disciplinary institutions, Treadwell sparks the major theoretical discussions of the twentieth century, later made famous by thinkers like Michel Foucault.

It is tempting, because so many of us come to Treadwell’s writing after reading these other male writers, to assume that she is following them, but it is crucial to remember that she came first, and is leading the vanguard.

London, 2018.

Rupert Goold is Artistic Director of the Almeida Theatre, London.

Machinal was first performed in Great Britain as The Life Machine in 1931. The play was first performed under its original title in the Lyttelton auditorium of the National Theatre, London, on 15 October 1993. The play was revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, on 11 June 2018 (previews from 4 June), with the following cast:

STENOGRAPHER/NURSE/

Nathalie Armin

MATRON

YOUNG WOMAN

Emily Berrington

FILING CLERK/BOY AT TABLE/

Khali Best

BAILIFF

MOTHER

Denise Black

ADDING CLERK/MAN AT TABLE/

Demetri Goritsas

PROSECUTION

DOCTOR/JUDGE/PRIEST

Andrew Lewis

JONES

Jonathan Livingstone

MAN AT TABLE/DEFENSE/

John Mackay

BARBER

SECOND MAN/JAILER

Alan Morrissey

TELEPHONE GIRL

Kirsty Rider

WOMAN AT TABLE/COURT REPORTER

Augustina Seymour

FIRST MAN

Dwane Walcott

DAUGHTER

Tidankay Abiba-Doukoure

Ta’lia Harvey

Poppy O’Mahony-Dawe

Other roles played by cast

Director

Natalie Abrahami

Set Design

Miriam Buether

Costume

Alex Lowde

Choreography

Arthur Pita

Lighting

Jack Knowles

Sound and Composition

Ben and Max Ringham

Casting

Julia Horan

Costume Supervisor

Jemima Penny

Prop Supervisor

Sharon Foley

Video

Robin Fisher

Voice and Dialect Coach

Emma Woodvine

Fight Director

Jonathan Holby

Resident Director

Joseph Winters

Associate Lighting Designer

Jamie Platt

Design Assistant

Joana Dias

Assistant Costume Supervisor

Emma Keaveney

Company Stage Manager

Kate McDowell

Deputy Stage Manager

Sophie Rubenstein

Assistant Stage Manager

Abi Cook

Introduction

Machinal is the most famous work of Sophie Treadwell, a playwright, journalist, novelist, producer and sometime actor and director who was born and raised in California. She began writing plays and acting at the University of California, from which she graduated in 1906. Treadwell hoped to be a performer but her onstage career was limited to a brief stint in vaudeville and occasional dramatic roles, usually in her own works. Like many American women playwrights of her generation she was trained as a reporter, and in her early years she covered everything from theatrical premieres to baseball games for the San Francisco Bulletin. Treadwell soon became a respected journalist whose accomplishments included an ‘undercover’ series on homeless women, an exclusive interview with Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, a European tour as a war reporter during World War One, and a year as a special correspondent in Mexico during World War Two.

As Nancy Wynn records in her dissertation on Treadwell, the playwright had a long and extraordinary life. Although she suffered from debilitating illnesses (with symptoms resembling those attributed to Helen in Machinal) she was an indefatigable worker and traveler. Her journeys throughout the world were sometimes the inspiration for her plays, whose settings extend from Moscow to Mexico. Treadwell was married for two decades until his death to journalist William O. McGeehan, but she retained her own name and career and often maintained a residence separate from his. A member of the feminist Lucy Stone League, she marched in favor of women’s suffrage and wrote about society’s oppression of women. She occasionally produced and even directed her own work, a rare accomplishment in the male-dominated world of the American commercial theater. In the course of her career Treadwell – who died in 1970 at the age of 84 – completed hundreds of newspaper stories, four novels and more than thirty plays, seven of which appeared on New York stages.

Treadwell’s early works include Gringo, based on her experiences in Mexico, and O Nightingale, a comedy about a stagestruck young woman that Treadwell herself co-produced. She wrote Machinal (the term is French for ‘mechanical’ or ‘automatic’), the play for which she is best remembered today, in 1928. Loosely based on the sensational murder trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, Machinal was a critical success, ran for 91 performances in New York, and was chosen by Burns Mantle for his volume The Best Plays of 1928-29. Reviewers compared the work favorably to Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy in theme and Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine in technique. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times – who was so intrigued by Machinal that he reviewed the production twice – called it ‘a triumph of individual distinction, gleaming with intangible beauty … an illuminating, measured drama such as we are not likely to see again.’ Machinal was even lauded in a Times editorial as a play that ‘in a hundred years … should still be vital and vivid.’ In 1931 the drama premiered in London under the title The Life Machine. Although some reviewers were offended by the play’s sexual content, the London Times critic had no such problem and considered all but the last scene ‘expressive and beautifully clean-cut.’ Machinal had its greatest triumph in Russia, where it enjoyed a long run at Moscow’s Kamerny Theatre before touring the provinces. A television adaptation was aired in the United States in 1954, and a revival with choreography by Sophie Maslow was performed a few years later.

Machinal uses expressionist techniques to create a parable about ‘an ordinary young woman’ who lives in a mechanized, materialistic world. Treadwell takes Helen through the stages of a kind of modern Everywoman: work in a boring office, marriage to a boss who offers her financial security (‘he’s a Vice-President – of course he’s decent’ her mother insists), a motherhood that oppresses her and a lover who abandons her. The expressionist form – flat characters, repetitive dialogue and action, numerous short scenes, harsh audio effects, confusion of inner and outer reality – is the perfect medium for presenting the life of a young woman who asks an impersonal society ‘Is nothing mine?’

Treadwell attacks capitalism for putting even intimate relationships on an economic footing, but her critique extends to technology, medicine, law, motherhood, the press, romance (including a speakeasy that closely resembles a contemporary singles bar) and even religion. It is a recognizably feminist critique as well: the audience looks through Helen’s eyes, understands the events from her perspective. Throughout the nine scenes – perhaps echoing the nine months of gestation – Treadwell shows her protagonist confronting a phalanx of male characters with the power to determine her life. Again and again Helen complains of claustrophobia, a motif of entrapment that runs as a common thread through the plays of such female contemporaries of Treadwell as Susan Glaspell, Zona Gale, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Lillian Hellman.

Sophie Treadwell never had another success comparable to Machinal, although she continued writing novels and plays for many years. Closest in theme and style to Machinal is the expressionist For Saxophone which relies heavily on music, dance and the voices of unseen characters to tell the story of another young woman trapped in a marriage of convenience. Her works also include Plumes in the Dust, based on the life of writer Edgar Allan Poe; Rights, an unproduced drama about eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft; and Hope for a Harvest, an autobiographical play exposing prejudice and environmental destruction in her native California. Embittered by the lukewarm reception of Harvest, Treadwell presented no more plays on the New York stage. In 1941, the very same year Hope for a Harvest appeared, the eminent critic George Jean Nathan sneered that ‘even the best of our [American] women playwrights falls immeasurably short of the mark of our best masculine’ because women ‘by nature’ lack ‘complete objectivity’ and the emotional control enjoyed by their male counterparts. It was in such an atmosphere of condescension that Sophie Treadwell strove to make her mark as a dramatist.

Unfortunately, most of the standard histories of drama in the United States reveal similar attitudes, and Treadwell rarely rates more than a line or two if she is acknowledged at all. Even granted that Machinal is her only outstanding work, the obscurity into which she and her play fell obviously has much to do with her gender (her sister playwrights suffered a similar fate) and to Machinal’s biting indictment of a world ruled by men. The current scholarly and theatrical interest in Treadwell and Machinal in the United States is partly due to feminist efforts to write women back into the theatrical history from which they have been erased, but it also stems from the fact that Machinal’s universe is uncomfortably like our own. The cacophony of urban sounds that underlies each scene is remarkably similar, while Machinal’s repetitive dialogue, woven of clichés, foreshadows the work of playwrights like Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and, as critic Frank Rich recently observed, David Mamet. As our lives become ever more mechanized and standardized, the story of one lone individual seeking to make her voice heard grows in relevance. Just as timely is the way Helen – like Treadwell herself – tries to find financial security without sacrificing her dreams, to control her own body and shape her own future, in a world in which women’s power to do so remains severely limited.

Judith E. Barlow

State University of New York at Albany

Characters

YOUNG WOMAN

TELEPHONE GIRL

STENOGRAPHER

FILING CLERK

ADDING CLERK

MOTHER

HUSBAND

BELLBOY

NURSE

DOCTOR

YOUNG MAN

GIRL

MAN

BOY

MAN

ANOTHER MAN

WAITER

JUDGE

LAWYER FOR DEFENSE

LAWYER FOR PROSECUTION

COURT REPORTER

BAILIFF

REPORTER

SECOND REPORTER

THIRD REPORTER

JAILER

MATRON

PRIEST

EPISODE I To Business

EPISODE II At Home

EPISODE III Honeymoon

EPISODE IV Maternal

EPISODE V Prohibited

EPISODE VI Intimate

EPISODE VII Domestic

EPISODE VIII The Law

EPISODE IX A Machine

The Plot is the story of a woman who murders her husband – an ordinary young woman, any woman.

The Plan is to tell this story by showing the different phases of life that the woman comes in contact with, and in none of which she finds any place, any peace. The woman is essentially soft, tender, and the life around her is essentially hard, mechanized. Business, home, marriage, having a child, seeking pleasure – all are difficult for her – mechanical, nerve nagging. Only in an illicit love does she find anything with life in it for her, and when she loses this, the desperate effort to win free to it again is her undoing.

The story is told in nine scenes. In the dialogue of these scenes there is the attempt to catch the rhythm of our common city speech, its brassy sound, its trick of repetition, etc.

Then there is, also, the use of many different sounds chosen primarily for their inherent emotional effect (steel riveting, a priest chanting, a Negro singing, jazz band, etc.), but contributing also to the creation of a background, an atmosphere.

The Hope