Machinal
Today we’re much more polite at openings–and most productions come across as stuffed and mounted, like the glass-eyed animals you find in cases at the Field Museum. Sometimes it seems that the only difference between shows is the quality of the taxidermy. And as sports, television, and movies have captured the partisans in our midst, there have been fewer and fewer scripts written that are even worth preserving.
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Tackling Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionist drama Machinal for the Hypocrites, Graney once again proves equal to the task of lifelike embalming. Together with an army of collaborators–including filmmaker Michael Corrigan, composer Kevin O’Donnell, sound designer Joseph Fosco, and cello player Nicole LeGett–he’s done a fabulous job of making the play seem as relevant today as when it opened on Broadway 75 years ago. And that’s saying a lot, because even just three generations ago theater was more alive than it is today. It seems remarkable now that such an experimental work could have been produced on America’s most visible theatrical street at all: each of the play’s nine discrete scenes has a different tone, and the language and story are intentionally fragmented.
The milieu of the play–lower-middle-class America in the 1920s–is familiar. And it’s one mark of Graney’s brilliance as a director that he uses our knowledge of the setting to full advantage. We’ve seen the dreary world of Treadwell’s protagonist before: the nine-to-five prison of clerical work, the bare apartment with paper-thin walls, the toxic relationships based more on need than on love. Acting as set designer as well as director, Graney implies even more than this with the addition of a prop or two, sometimes intentionally anachronistic. The tiny beat-up television that sits in the middle of a rickety kitchen table tells us all we need to know about our heroine’s restricted worldview and nearly empty bank account. Corrigan’s montages of images from the 20s and 30s intercut with more contemporary shots in factories and along the Chicago lakefront serve a similar purpose, providing historical context and, in some cases, the emotional tone missing from Treadwell’s intentionally spare script.
