Albany, NY -- The University at Albany’s Theatre Program is pleased to kick off its production season with a 1920s American classic: Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, staged in-the-round in the Performing Arts Center’s Arena Theatre by Visiting Director Sarah Blush. This play has a special connection to UAlbany: theatre scholar and English Department Professor Emerita Judith Barlow is credited with rediscovering the work in the 1980s, leading to successful revivals on Broadway and in London, and countless University productions across the country.

This feminist play, and masterpiece of Expressionist style, was inspired by the sensational murder trial of Ruth Snyder, which also inspired Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. It tells the story of an “ordinary young girl” Helen Jones, following her from a failed office worker, to marrying her predatory boss to help support her mother; from her experience with oppressive motherhood, to a breath of air with the lover she meets in a speakeasy; to finally murdering her husband after her lover abandons her. Helen Jones, like the real-life Snyder, meets tragic ends when she is sentenced to execution by the electric chair.

After a successful Broadway premiere (with a young Clark Gable playing the lover), the play disappeared from the male-dominated theatrical cannon for over 50 years until it was rediscovered by UAlbany English Department’s Professor Emerita Judith Barlow, who published the play in 1985 in a collection of works by women from the 1920s and 1930s. It went on to acclaimed runs Off-Broadway — where it was heralded as “a piece of living art that seems timeless,” (New York Times) — on Broadway — in an “intensely stylist revival” (New York Times) in 2014 — and most recently, last spring at the Old Vic in London, where it was described as “pulverizing rapture” (Time Out London).

The UAlbany production features a large ensemble cast of nine students, most of them Theatre majors and minors, as well as student designers, mentored by faculty members and led by the production’s visiting Sound Designer John Gasper. Director Sarah Blush describes her fascination with the piece: “I've long wanted to direct Machinal, Treadwell’s seminal play about gender and alienation. Written nearly 100 years ago, this timeless text — like the subject matter that inspired it — is both mundane and outlandish, naturalistic yet stylized. It’s amazing fodder for exploring loneliness through collectivity.”

“In the Theatre Program, several of our classes cover this play, where our students remark on not only its Expressionist style, but also the ways it explores issues of gender roles and mechanization/AI in startlingly contemporary ways,” says Theatre Program Director Kate Walat. “The fact that the play was brought back to the American theatre by UAlbany’s own Professor Judy Barlow makes our connection to the play even more vital.”  

This production is in keeping with the Theatre Program’s dedication to performing classic American plays such as last fall’s production of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, and the year before, August Wilson’s A Piano Lesson.

Next up in the Theatre Program’s season will be the first production of a new play: Mary Shelley Meets Frankenstein by Kate Alice Walat, directed by Ryan Garbayo (who helmed The Taming of the Shrew last spring). That will be followed by the ever-popular musical: Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show, directed by Shaun Patrick Tubbs (Visiting Assistant Professor of Directing) in the Main Theatre and featuring a live band; and the FRESH ACTS festival of new plays, written and directed by students in collaboration.