MACHINAL
Like Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine or Chaplin’s Modern Times, Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionistic drama–now being staged by Fly’s Eye Theatre, an arm of Theater Oobleck–depicts a world where human relations equal economic transactions, where people sell their future without feeling the loss. Helen’s ill-defined hopes for happiness or freedom don’t stand a chance. Alienation dogs her like her insomnia. Every attempt she makes to escape the tedium of work or marriage only brings on a new subservience.
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Yet this indictment feels a lot less fresh today than it must have in 1928. We harbor fewer illusions that materialism buys freedom (though that hasn’t stopped us from equating them). As theater, Machinal suffers from its own familiarity, a left-handed tribute to its influence: nothing Treadwell does to passive Helen is worse than what Christopher Durang inflicts on his martyred women or David Mamet did to Edmond.
