Review: Machinal by Paper Chairs
by Michael Meigs
This production of Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, currently playing at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre, is a memorable staging of a 1928 shocker -- which in 21st century terms means that it is endearingly two dimensional.
Back in the 1920's,most American theatre art was unexciting, conventional or cast in moral platitudes. At the same time, newspaper reporting of crimes was sensationalistic and very big business. In a time when both radio and cinema were still new, big city newspapers' accounts of murders and of murder trials sold a lot of papers.
Those days have been memorialized in cinema and in theatre. For example, Chicago journalist Maurine Dallas Watkins scored a big hit in the theatre with a thinly fictionalized account of the 1924 exploits of two murderesses, both of whom were acquitted. That 1926 play ran for 171 performances and was the basis for Kander and Ebb's 1975 musical Chicago, featuring the oh-so-innocent but oh-so-guilty Roxy Hart -- a musical revived successfully in New York in 1990 and made into an Academy- award-winning film in 2002.
Journalist SophieTreadwell scored a similar succès de scandale with Machinal, a poetic, expressionistic imagining based on the crime and execution at Sing Sing prison of Ruth Snyder. Treadwell had covered the 1927 murder trial. The state execution of Snyder in January, 1928 was a huge sensation, both because this was New York's first execution of a woman since 1899 and because the New York Daily News published the next day a photo of the execution, taken with a hidden camera strapped to the ankle of one of its journalists.
Machinal opened in New York in fall, 1928, featuring the relatively unknown actor Clark Gable in the pivotal role of a relaxed seducer whose casual attitude (Quien sabe? Who knows what might happen?) eventually opened the way for the Young Woman to undertake murderous action.
Treadwell surprised and disturbed her audiences with disruptive action, an emotionally fraught heroine, staccato dialogue and sharp vignettes to establish the thesis that the unnamed Young Woman at the center of this piece was a victim, even though she was a murderess. Critic Brooks Atkinson wrote, “Subdued, monotonous, episodic, occasionally eccentric, Machinal is fraught with a beauty unfamiliar to the stage.” That and similar reviews opened the way to a run of 91 performances.
In the Paper Chairs version, wide-eyed, tentative Chase Crossno arrives at an accounting office in the first scene, dizzy and disoriented from her trip on the New York subway, to be greeted by raucous fellow workers delighted to inform her that the boss wants to see her -- personally, and right away. She is confused and without counsel during much of the action -- the sort of young woman who at the urging of her crass old mother sleeps with gloves in order to preserve the beauty of her hands. . . but for what and for whom, she does not know.
Treadwell wrote a succession of scenes labeled like sections of a chapbook. They suggest the life progression imposed upon an evidently fatherless young woman by paternalistic, patriarchical society: To Work, At Home, Honeymoon, Maternal, Prohibited, Intimate, Domestic, The Law, and A Machine.
Director Dustin Wills chose a strong cast and they deliver this inverted morality tale with great conviction. Chase Crossno is convincingly vulnerable and clueless throughout -- a particularly difficult task for any actor, since the naïvité of the character risks being misread as ineptitude on the part of the actor.
One is invited to believe that the Young Woman has been driven to desperation by forces beyond her control. Director Wills stages the story of a waif-gone-wrong with an assertive expressionist approach, paying close attention to the changing rhythms of the piece. Some of Austin's best are on this stage. Jennifer Underwood makes much of the relatively thankless role of the complaining, disappointed mother, in a passage of scarcely ten minutes. Tom Truss as the young boss, suitor, husband and (unseen) as the murder victim catches deftly the smiling, patronizing attitude of a man who is completely blind to emotional nuance.
The pivotal scene between Crossno and Gabriel Luna, playing the casual seducer wafted with the winds of freedom and disengagement, is a beautifully understated passage, completely convincing in portraying the allure of this affair embraced by the young wife and mother.
Robert Pierson in his multiple roles as various incarnations of masculine authority provides a through-line for Treadwell's theme. He differentiates vividly among them -- a manic adding machine clerk; a smug doctor; an attentive, disengaged and decisive judge; and, finally, as the droning ecclesiastical voice of Biblical morality accompanying the woman to the electric chair.
Lisa Laratta's set is inventive and practical. She and Wills have transformed the familiar Salvage Vanguard space into a true theatre in the round, with the audience ranged at floor level on all sides of a raised platform endowed with multiple trap doors, hiding places, and high hanging bars for the suspension of doors, windows and decorations. The cast transforms the space in an agile, purposeful ballet between scenes.
At points, the action seems a bit over-directed. Just to cavil, I wasn't convinced of the appropriatenesss or necessity of having the switchboard operator on roller skates, orbiting the platform throughout the first scene, chattering to a box held in her hands. And the hospital scene in which the Young Woman refuses to accept her newborn child is undercut by the decision to run an insistent ping on the sound system throughout (in 1928 there were no audible life-monitoring systems, with the possible exception of the suck of an iron lung). These are minor, expressions of exuberance that were overlooked or even embraced by almost everyone in the audience. In recompense, the music featured in the central love scene was perfectly in tune with the emotion of the scene.
Recommended.
Review by Jeanne Claire van Ryzin in the Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog, June 4
Review by Elizabeth Cobbe in Austin Chronicle, June 4
Review by Dan Solomon for austinist.com, June 10
Review by webmaster at TheatreAustin, Yahoo groups, June 17
Click to view the program of Machinal by Paper Chairs
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Machinal
by Sophie Treadwell
Paper Chairs
