Stage

...Even her killing of her husband is ironic because both the weapon (a bottle full of pebbles) and the motive ("I had to get free-didn't I?") are borrowed from a story her lover told her about a murder he committed to escape from bandits in Mexico...

...The candidate has just been elected at the Public, and the campaign literature-the program notes-owes a great deal to Barlow's introduction to her anthology...

...Her last word, an offstage cry from the electric chair, is: "Somebody...

...Somebod...

...Yet, it did not become a serious candidate for revival until 1981, when Judith E. Barlow included it in her Plays by American Women...

...The protagonist of Sophie Treadwell's 1928 play is the Young Woman-"an ordinary young woman, any woman," as the playwright says in a note to the published play-who has an inchoate need to transcend the mechanical expectations of the society that defines her role and denies her individuality...

...What Greif has brought to the play is a sense of continuous movement...

...It has been available for the last forty years in one of John Gassner's Best Plays volumes, which is where I read it when I was growing up as a student of American drama...

...Whether the playwright is using the heightened realism of the kitchen scene and the intimate scene with the lover or the antire-alistic cacophony of the office scene, she depends on clich6 and repetition, reiterated platitudes that signal the attitudes toward work, marriage, motherhood, possessions, and money that provide the protagonist's only choices...

...It is a rumor that has the ring of truth...

...The characters in the cast list are designated by role-Young Woman, Mother, Husband, Lover (more properly "Man" in the printed play)-and the names that appear in the text-Jones, Smith, Roe-are almost as generic as the labels...

...Yet, it is clear that there is something alive struggling in the web that has trapped her...

...On stage, as played by Jodie Markell, she has wit and a sense of mockery, however stunted, and an assertiveness that she does not know how to use positively...

...The mechanical action and speeches of the opening office scene are carried into the bridges between scenes, a transformation of settings, a shifting of props that heighten the sense of Young Woman being caught in circumstances that are constantly changing and always the same...

...Her one gesture of self-definition-the way she fluffs the edge of her hair-remains with her into the electric chair, but it is hardly strong enough to break down the prison walls...

...We follow her through nine scenes in which we see her as an ineffectual office worker, a cowed daughter, a reluctant bride, an unwilling mother, a momentarily happy lover, and finally a murderer-on trial and, then, on death row...

...GERALD WEALES...

...Her story could have been told through conventional sentimental realism, but Treadwell prefers to use expressionistic devices that emphasize the context over the woman herself...

...Where Machinal differs from its brothers under the scrim is that it is a play by a woman with a woman protagonist...

...On the page, she is almost too squashed a cabbage to be the central figure in a play...

...Greif's debut is Machinal once again, in a production that does credit to him, to Treadwell, and to the Public...

...Treadwell's highly efficient antimachine machine keeps the attention as much on society as on its victim...

...Her impulse to escape is regularly stifled by everyone from her nagging mother and the boosterish boss who marries her to the barbers who prepare her for execution...

...Her desperation can be heard in the recurrent words and phrases that indicate her longing for peace and rest, her yearning to be free, her search for breathing space, her unwillingness to submit, her attempt to find somebody who can actually see her, understand her...

...Greif is one of a group of young directors who have been appointed to oversee much of the Public's new season, presumably lifting the artistic burden off the shoulders of the Founding Father...

...The expressionistic devices can be funny-as they are here when Marge Redmond (Mother), a master of the querulous cliche", and John Seitz (Husband), a master of the pompous cliche, are on stage-but within the laughter there is the hard edge of anger and sadness...

...The play's devices, and its indictment of a society in which routine devours the individual, place it in the generic line that includes Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923), Beggar on Horseback (1924) by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, and more gentle doses of the decade's fascination with cliche, like J. P. McEvoy's The Potters (1923), which I wish someone would revive, and the Gershwins' "The Babbitt and the Bromide" from Funny Face (1927...

...Machinal has much more to do with Broadway's essays in expressionism in the 1920s than with a current event, however lurid...

...STAGE YOUNG WOMAN IN A WEB 'MACHINAL' AT THE PUBLIC Numor has it that Joseph Papp asked Michael Greiftojoin the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater after seeing his production of Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, a workshop presented by Naked Angels in late 1989...

...That, feminist critics have suggested, is why it fell into obscurity after its initial success, but it was never as lost as later criticism has suggested...

...Michael Greif's Machinal is theatricality with substance, which is just what Sophie Treadwell wanted it to be...

...It has been-and still is-customary to suggest that Sophie Treadwell's play found its origin in the Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray murder case, but except that the young woman in Machinal dies in the electric chair as Ruth Snyder did (the first woman to be so honored by the American justice system), there is little similarity between the play and its presumed source...