ROUNDABOUT BLOG

Ted Sod: Why did you choose to direct Machinal? 

Lyndsey Turner: I first read Machinal when I was at university: I was struck by the boldness of the writing, the way Treadwell follows, with brutal inexorable logic, the journey of an unremarkable woman through a series of encounters which lead her to commit a remarkable act. The play is a brilliant account of the impact of mechanization and industrialization on American society, as well a forensic and unflinching portrait of a young woman in crisis.

I’ve loved the play for years, so when the Roundabout approached me and asked whether I might be interested in making a new production of it, I pretty near fell off my chair. Machinal isn’t Medea: it’s not about a princess making a grand gesture in order to exact revenge, it’s about an ordinary working woman. And as much as it concerns itself with love, death, birth, and identity, Treadwell’s scenes are also full of the stuff of life: salesmen who dream of Swiss watches, a panic attack on the subway, the proper way to wash dishes. But it’s also a play which demands a great deal of the actor playing Helen, which is why I was beyond thrilled when Rebecca Hall came on board. It takes a great deal of humanity, craft, and courage to play a character who isn’t allowed to act on her own behalf, and Rebecca is one of the only actors of her generation with the creativity, precision, and insight to create that performance. 

Rebecca Hall in rehearsal for Machinal. Photo by Jenny Anderson.

TS: What do you think the play is about?

LT: The play was written as a response to the death of Ruth Snyder, the first woman to be sentenced to the electric chair as a punishment for murdering her husband. Despite the fact that no cameras were permitted in the chamber where Snyder died, a journalist hid a device in his trousers and managed to take a picture moments after her death. The photograph made the front pages of newspapers around the country the next day. Treadwell was a journalist who had covered a number of high profile trials in which women were accused of murdering their husbands. I feel certain that the writer was interested not only in the circumstances that led to these murders, but also in the way these trials became media sensations. This image of a woman whose words, movements, clothes, sexual relationships and fitness to be a mother had come in for daily scrutiny throughout a court case which had lasted months, now sitting dead in an electric chair for all the world to see must have struck Treadwell as obscene. Even in death, Snyder was regarded as public property.

Treadwell had completed Machinal within four months of Synder’s death. And although the play isn’t concerned with telling the story of this now notorious murderess, its focus on the ways in which the increasing mechanization of the workplace, the stultifying domesticity of marriage, the ruthless expertise of the medical profession, and the impossibility of finding a place of peace or rest in an increasingly frenetic world provide a context in which a woman might be driven to take a violent and radical action in order to break free.

The play gives the lie to the image of the 1920s as a decade of unprecedented freedom: it’s a savage indictment of a society whose pursuit of efficiency and prosperity leads to a woman becoming trapped in the very machines designed to liberate her.

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