Machinal Rebecca Hall and Morgan Spector | Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Machinal is a play set inside a machine, and its mechanical unfolding delivers on the promise of its title. Its heroine, Helen, begins as an unhappy and unpunctual office girl, hating her position yet fearful of losing it. She resolves that conflict by marrying her boss, whom she loathes, hoping to find in a mercenary marriage escape from the drudgery of her job and the demands of her abrasive mother. A child is born, and Helen is so repelled by her daughter that she refuses even to hold her in the hospital nursery. She is of course deeply unsatisfied in her marriage and attempts to resolve this conflict, first with adultery, and then with murder. This leads to a final encounter, this time with one of the characteristic machines of the twentieth century: the electric chair. Conflict, resolution, curtains.
The play was written by the American journalist and playwright Sophie Treadwell, and had its first performance in 1928. It was regarded as one of the great plays of its time, anthologized in Burns Mantle’s Best Playsannual, but it disappeared from Broadway for nearly a century until the current revival at the American Airlines Theater. (As theater seating goes, the American Airlines Theater lives up to its name, assuming we’re talking economy class.) The 1928 literary vintage was marked heavily by both the sordid and philosophical speculations about the ability
