Three quarters or so through the way through Timeline Theatre’s vivid, smart and wholly absorbing Not Enough Air, an unforgettable black and white photo materializes on a pair of cage-like metal doors. In the blink of an eye, the image appears, a horrifying portrait of a woman in the electric chair at the precise moment thousands of volts of electricity coursed through and killed her. It’s a nightmare moment that sears itself in the memory. It is also indicative of the overall dramatic power of Timeline’s production. Directed by Nick Bowling, Masha Obolensky’s expressionistic true crime fable is a triumph of atmospheric storytelling and disquieting truths.
The rapidly palpitating heart of Not Enough Air is reporter and playwright Sophie Treadwell. In lesser hands, her story could send the play into tooth-gnashing melodramatic overdrive. That the piece remains solidly rooted in emotional honesty instead of veering into overwrought emoting is a credit to Bowling’s astute direction and a bravura performance by Janet Ulrich Brooks. As Sophie, Brooks captures the tormented writer’s Quixotic crusade to inject a modicum of fairness into the media feeding frenzy that devoured Ruth Snyder, the woman in the shocking photo.
It’s early in the year yet, but come October when the final ballot for the Jeff Awards comes out, Brooks should be front and center in the Best Actress column. As a feminist and reporter/playwright in the 1920s, Treadwell’s hit drama Machinal told the story of Ruth Snyder, a young woman (“any woman”) condemned to die after murdering her husband. The media made Snyder out to be the ultimate femme fatale, a loose, evil woman who corrupted the men she didn’t kill in cold blood.Treadwall saw someone else – a woman unbearably stifled by a job that demanded she be a machine and a husband who treated her like a child.
Not Enough Air shows Treadwell’s seething frustration with the sexist, sensationalist and ultimately deadly media portrayal of Snyder as a man eater as well as the writer’s all-consuming struggle to get the real story out. She’s not initially helped much by Snyder (Danica Ivancevic) herself.
“You want some of me for yourself,” Snyder astutely observes, “You want to stick your flag in my thigh and say ‘this is mine.’ ” That, of course, is painfully true to an extent. But Treadwell’s motives go far deeper. So deep, in fact, that visions of Snyder begin to haunt her every waking moment.
“Could it happen to me? Could it happen to you?” demands a Greek chorus of voices in Treadwell’s head. Yes – it could. Suffocating to death under relentless demands of submission, Snyder – like any woman in such a life-or-death battle – snaps and lashes out.
What’s especially impressive about Timeline’s vivid, nuanced rendering of Obolensky’s harrowing drama is the cast’s ability to capture a realistic human tragedy through a text that constantly spins out of realism and into expressionistic dreamscapes of percussive word repetition, surreal images and hallucinatory bends of time and the mind. Heather Gilbert’s terrifically evocative lighting design subtly signals the phantoms in the brain that drive Treadwell to brilliance and despair.
There’s outstanding supporting work by David Parkes as Treadwell’s feminist but frustrated husband, a spouse of intriguing depths and shortcomings. And Terry Hamilton is bravely superb as Snyder’s wholly unlikeable, dumb-ox husband.
Those who remember Hypocrites production of “Machinal” a few years ago get see a reprisal of sorts here, as Mechelle Moe knits her brows once again and returns to the role of the Young Woman at the center of Treadwell’s play.
