When oppressed, what's best? Southbank's 'Machinal' offers no pretty answers

We are trained to believe in individual moral responsibility, but it's not making excuses to insist on the larger picture of understanding its limits. How are some of us more stamped than others by inescapable influences that rob us of agency? "Machinal" suggests strongly that for women, particularly a century ago, freedom of action is shaped conclusively by social limits affecting love, work, and family connections.

The 1928 play by Sophie Treadwell is worth the expressionist revival that Southbank Theatre Company gives it through next Sunday at Shelton Auditorium. The theatrical style, conscientiously shepherded here under Marcia Eppich-Harris' direction, means that the feeling of events, especially protagonist-centered, is as important as the facts involved. There's no separation between what happens to the main character and how she processes her experience, symbolized and dream-linked as it is. Narrative orderliness is immaterial in this sort of storytelling. 

Helen (Alaine Sims) is subject to office scuttlebutt.

There's necessarily fine ensemble craftsmanship in the staging and acting, all in the service of the leading performance of Alaine Sims as Helen, an urban office worker susceptible to manipulation at every turn.

Self-control eludes her constantly, and her desperation to escape submission propels her toward a fatal outcome. The first scene is a marvelously assembled tapestry of office gossip about Helen's involvement with a predatory boss, his head stuffed with cliches of ambition and purpose. She is ensnared by what she thinks she wants or what others have molded as her destiny.

The playwright based her play on the celebrated trial and execution of Ruth Snyder in 1927. In a story based on a love triangle, a murder conspiracy, and the lovers' bungled coverup, "the forces of ballyhoo got into action," as Frederick Lewis Allen recalled in his lively account of the Roaring Twenties, "Only Yesterday." 

Treadwell expanded and reshaped the sensationalism into a feminist examination of the forces of oppression. There's clearly an agenda dramatized to universalize one woman's attempt at a way out. All may be worthy of punishment to some degree, but for its own good (it thinks), society cherrypicks who should pay the penalty. As Shakespeare asks rhetorically in Hamlet's voice: "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?"

 

In "Machinal" everybody escapes except Helen. Even the murder victim is less victimized than she. 

Some of the other actors center on immovable characters in Helen's life —  her mother (Beverly Roche), her boss who becomes her husband (Patrick Vaughn), and her lover (Brant Hughes) — but four other actors move also into an ensemble functioning as a perfectly coordinated Greek chorus, gesturing  menacingly and uttering Helen's words and the verbal tags that attach to her. They are J Charles Weimer, Natalie Beglin, Nia Hughes, and Adriana Menefee.

The way they mime, shout, and beat patterns on hard surfaces amounts to a fusillade in her head, leading to the crime that results in her death. This isn't a spoiler, as the execution occurs in a preamble to the first scene. A grimly absurdist courtroom scene later is thus the imprint of how the doomed woman processes her fate. Every scene is woven into a tight pattern of controlling circumstances.

Facing her demise, Helen reaches out to her mother. 

The look of the show picks up elements of a century ago with touches of today. That's in Eppich-Harris' vision of what "Machinal" means, insofar as the system and the cultural values of long ago still hold sway. Clearly the audience is coaxed into wondering if the idea of freedom is a hoax particularly galling to those most unlikely to realize their dreams. Three stark panels including mirrors that reflect the audience at angles offer a clue. The very furniture is adaptable to represent constraining environments. 

Sims' portrayal vividly crosses boundaries from unfocused hope through confusion to illusion to paralyzing agony to a belated sense of having someone worth clinging to: a mother who never had a surer sense of what might be available to Helen than her daughter does. The question of who can be expected to act according to conscience remains. In a world of irresistible pressures, no one may be entitled to fulfillment. 

[Photos: Indy Ghost Light]