Machinal is the most famous work of Sophia Treadwell, a playwright, journalist, novelist, producer, and sometime actor and director who was born and raised in California. She began writing plays and acting at the University of California, from which she graduated in 1906. Treadwell hoped to be a performer but her onstage career was limited to a brief stint in vaudeville and occasional dramatic roles, usually in her own works. Like many American women playwrights of her generation, she was trained as a reporter, and in her early years, she covered everything from theatrical premiers to baseball games for the San Francisco Bulletin. Treadwell soon became the respected journalist whose accomplishments included an exclusive interview with Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, a European tour as a war reporter during World War One, and a year as a special correspondent in Mexico during World War Two.
Treadwell had a long and extraordinary life. Although she suffered from debilitating illness (with symptoms resembling those attributed to Helen in Machinal) she was an indefatigable worker and traveler. Her journeys throughout the world were sometimes the inspiration for her plays, whose settings extended from Moscow to Mexico. A member of the feminist Lucy Stone Leauge, she marched in favor of women’s suffrage and wrote about society’s oppression of women. She occasionally produced and even directed her own work, a rare accomplishment in the male-dominated world of American commercial theater. In the course of her career Treadwell—who died in 1970 at the age of 84—completed hundreds of newspaper stories, four novels, and more than thirty plays, seven of which appeared on New York stages.
Machinal uses expressionist techniques to create a parable about ‘an ordinary young woman’ who lives in a mechanized, materialistic world. Treadwell takes Helen through the stages of a kind of modern Everywoman: work in a boring office, marriage to a boss who offers her financial security (‘he’s a Vice-President—of course, he's decent’ her mother insists), a motherhood that oppresses her and a lover who abandons her. The expressionist form—flat characters, repetitive dialogue and action, numerous short scenes, harsh audio effects, confusion of inner and outer reality—is the perfect medium for presenting the life of a young woman who asks an impersonal society ‘is nothing mine?’
Treadwell attacks capitalism for putting even intimate relationships on an economic footing, but her critique extends to technology, medicine, law, motherhood, the press, romance (including a speakeasy that closely resembles a contemporary singles bar) and even religion. It is recognizably a feminist critique as well: the audience looks through Helen's eyes, understands the events from her perspective. Throughout the nine scenes—perhaps echoing the nine months of gestation—Treadwell shows her protagonist confronting a phalanx of male characters with the power to determine her life. Again and again, Helen complains of claustrophobia, a motif of entrapment that runs as a common thread through the plays of such female contemporaries of Treadwell.
Even granted that Machinal is her only outstanding work, the obscurity into which she and her play fell obviously has much to do with her gender (her sister playwrights suffered a similar fate) and to Machinal’s biting indictment of a world ruled by men. The current scholarly and theatrical interest in Treadwell and Machinal in the United States is partly due to feminist efforts to write women back into the theatrical history from which they have been erased, but it also stems from the fact that Machinal’s universe is uncomfortably like our own. The cacophony of urban sounds that underlies each scene is remarkably similar, while Machinal’s repetitive dialogue, woven of clichés, foreshadows the work of playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.
