‘Machinal’s’ comeback story
Revival of 1928 Broadway production has plenty to say to modern audiences
Although it’s often a mystery why something suddenly becomes fashionable again, the conventional story of “Machinal’s” comeback (to be performed at Cape Breton University’s Boardmore Theatre, Feb. 12-17) is simple. But it’s also deceptively simplistic.
By the end of 1927 according to the New York Evening Post, the sensational Ruth Snyder “celebrity trial” generated almost two million words of press coverage — mostly sordid details — lapped up by the public in the media hotbed of Gotham. The trial was a creative source for reporter James M. Cain’s “Double Indemnity” (crime-fiction later turned into the classic film noir).
It also attracted high-profile observers, such as D.W. Griffith (director of “Birth of a Nation”) and Will Durant (historian/philosopher author of “Story of Civilization”). But it was a little-known spectator, Sophie Treadwell, who delved most deeply and imaginatively into the trial’s cultural meaning — transforming it into a dramatic parable of an “ordinary young woman” seeking love, and an elusive freedom she was willing to die for.
The 1928 Broadway premiere of “Machinal” (the term is based upon the French word for “mechanical,” “automatic,” or “involuntary” but the title has been characterized in English–speaking playbills variously as MAK-in-al [long A] or Ma-SHIN-al or MAshin-al) was a surprise popular success. Jazz-age audiences were entertained by the relentless momentum of the 90-minute drama. Critics lavished praise on its A-list actors (Clark Gable was the love interest), imaginative designers, and a skillful director who maximized the power of Sophie Treadwell’s highly stylized writing. But the playwright was treated as a one-hit wonder and her masterpiece was forgotten for 60 years.
Why the comeback? Unlike the original “Chicago” (another 1926 female-authored play with a similar theatrical premise), “Machinal” could never have been reborn as a musical comedy appealing to mass taste. In fact, its recent canonization as a theatre “classic” is due to a similar combination of heart and high-concept that fascinated earlier audiences.
Concept-wise, references are often made to Fritz Lang’s scifi epic Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (a throwback and a swansong to the silent movie era). Treadwell, after all, was an early 20th century pioneer of investigative journalism who observed first-hand how the rigid management of behavior essential to mass production dehumanized labor and made rich bosses richer.
Rooted in painful, personal experience, however, “Machinal’s” perspective was distinctive. All aspects of life were being mechanized and monetized, but Treadwell identified most closely with millions of workers in new economic sectors inhabiting offices in the skyscrapers increasingly dominating the previously industrial urban landscape. Automation was creating jobs and, after the Depression hit, this naturally looked like an unalloyed good. But some people then — like many millennials now — longed for work that was not “just a job.”
“Machinal” imaginatively represented their reality: sedentary work requiring repetitive movements distorted bodies; interpersonal communication tended toward telegraphic clichés expressed in staccato patterns; and interior lives became raw material for crafted emotional performances which the media industry frantically fed to their target markets. Nevertheless, within “Machinal’s” oppressive system — its beating heart — is one young woman trying to construct a life that is her own life, against impossible odds.
Our lucrative 21st Century nostalgia business regularly represses the visceral fear which 1928 audiences had for the Borg-like reality underlying Roaring 20’s glitz and glam. But they had a striking blind spot. In a word, the “ordinary young woman’s” gender seemed irrelevant to them. Reviewers saw a traditional, gender-free “Everyman” on-stage. Today, someone somewhere is probably marketing “Machinal” as a perfect period piece for the #MeToo age: “I will not submit,” says the young woman (resistance is not futile).
However, explaining “Machinal’s” comeback by calling it a “feminist play,” can be the new — careless or subtly malicious — way of marginalizing it. Treadwell was indeed active in the “first wave” of feminism culminating in the legal right to vote for white women (1920 U.S. and 1921 Canada). And throughout her life she fought in the “second wave” for social justice and equality.
Ironically though, this is almost invisible in “Machinal.” Front and centre, by contrast, is Treadwell’s clairvoyant anticipation of feminism’s “third wave” insight that gender is constructed by the repetition of acts associated with male or female. The young woman’s fate is determined by her refusal (or inability?) to perform as required.
“Machinal’s” vision is broad — encompassing an emerging American empire pervaded by reflex Trump-like racism (black males are dangerous, Mexicans are sinister aliens) and centred symbolically in New York, the breeding ground for a certain human type: the hustler — with lots of side-hustles and a ruthless talent for closing deals with hustling competitors. When the business of any culture is business, that type prospers and hence, according to Treadwell, recurring socioeconomic disasters are inevitable (1929, 2008, etc.)
Then and now, however, “Machinal’s” spotlight is on a single person — one woman moved by those strange reasons of the heart about which the machine knows nothing. It will have unique Valentine’s flavour for anyone with a taste for a theatrical box of fine dark chocolates.