MACHINAL gears up at Fells Point Corner Theatre
From September 6th through 29th, Fells Point Corner Theatre is featuring one of the landmark American plays of the last century, Sophie Treadwell’s Expressionist tour-de-force, Machinal.
Directed by Deirdre McAllister, the production comes to life 96 years almost to the day since the play premiered to both shock and acclaim on September 7th, 1928. A mere week, incidentally, after Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill opened their Expressionist musical collaboration, Threepenny Opera, in Berlin.
But in that intervening century, McAllister insists, almost nothing about the story or its implications has gone stale.
Playwright and journalist Treadwell, a groundbreaking pioneer in both fields in her day, based the work off the sordid true-life crime, trial, and execution of a young New Yorker who conspired with her lover to murder her husband. She covered the trial as a reporter, then used her dramatic imagination and creative empathy to retell and reframe the saga in an Expressionist form–looking perhaps to counterbalance the sensationalism, misogyny, and vitriol of the contemporary media. Instead, Treadwell offers a more nuanced or sympathetic perspective that also shifts guilt from the individual to systems and circumstances.
Where other authors and dramatists of the era had opted to tell similar stories through the lens of a documentary and objective Naturalism, in such works as Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin or Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Treadwell instead joined the groundswell of experimentalists then transforming American theater–folks like Susan Glaspell, Elmer Rice, and a young Eugene O’Neill.
With the script newly in the public domain, the production offered McAllister and FPCT a chance to have their way with the play as they saw fit; but, as McAllister explained in our conversation, they chose to stick with the original and trust to its timely resonance and enduring relevance.
You can enjoy her thoughts on the play and the production in the audio below, then find out more or snag tickets here.
