Machinal (review)

Mechelle Moe is an odd looking actress. Small, pale, with tiny close-set eyes peering below her stiffly styled wig, she shrinks onstage only to shoot a raspy melodious torrent of words that mount toward the expressionistic shrei that lurks below the text of Machinal: "I will not submit." Moe must be watched, yet she can be unbearable to hear. Accompanied by an onstage cello player echoing her voice, Moe courted and assaulted the audience—plaintive, aggressive, unceasing in struggling with the society/machine that consumed her.

Moe's performance was ideal for The Hypocrites—an intense, irreverent, migratory Chicago theatre group headed by polymath director Sean Graney. The Hypocrites' trademark is a maniacal take on theatrical classics, and this fervor served Machinal honestly. The text is a cry of anguish about women's dehumanization at the hands of parents, job, husband, and children. Sophie Treadwell's 1928 drama is not yet treated as a canonical classic. However, it is a breakthrough American assimilation of the European avant-garde. Treadwell's absence from traditional theatre history reflects gender bias more than an objective judgment. Based on an actual court case Treadwell covered, Machinal premiered on Broadway in 1928. It was a hit there and in London, where it was titled The Life Machine. Machinal was a forgotten text until a series of revivals occurred in the 1990s. The 1993 production at the Royal National Theatre, directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Fiona Shaw, was a sensation. Daldry created a machine ballet in the vastness of the Lyttelton performance space. It featured an enormous cogs-and-wheels set for the opening office sequence and a haunting placement of the "Domestic" scene with furniture sitting mid-air atop massive poles.

The Hypocrites had a much smaller pool of resources. However, their vision which encompassed the physical, visual, and emotional world of the play, was as visceral as Daldry's. Graney framed the different boundaries of each episode's playing space with simple moveable panels, onto which he projected video images, which often adumbrated the actions of the subsequent scenes. Images of rats gave way to the "Domestic" setting in which a gaudy, formal portrait of a rat completed the drawing room decor; before the "Maternal" episode in which Helen refused to see or nurse her baby daughter, the video ended with a mechanized assembly line of milk cartons that moved in robotic rhythm across the screens. The synchronization worked so well that, as the screens rolled back, it looked as if the conveyor belt extended into Helen's space.

Perhaps the most stunning moment in the show came in the "Prohibited" episode when Helen accepted a cigarette and allowed her prospective lover to light it for her. In a chain reaction that took only seconds to unfold, every other actor in the crowded bar scene lit a cigarette for someone else. In a flash, the entire ensemble, which had just previously been involved in background hubbub, was coolly smoking a cigarette and eyeing Helen—or were they eyeing us in the audience? The thrilling effect of this was to make Helen's gesture echo, thereby forcing the audience to remember later how she began on the path that led to the murder of her husband.

Helen's plunge into forbidden love and freedom was counterpointed in the "Prohibited" episode by overlapping vignettes of temptation, seduction, and trespass. Graney then staged the "Intimate" episode with a superlative use of space and focus. While the costuming and lighting of the rest of the show emphasized red and black (though Helen was always in navy blue), this scene was washed in blue and white. A cheap painting of a waterfall rigged to light up and emit the sound of rushing water hung beside the bed. The tackiness of the painting belied its gloriousness: it was the brightest, happiest image onstage all evening, and Moe's Helen was enraptured by the image and calmed by the sound.

The luminous...