Masha Obolensky’s impressive new drama, “Not Enough Air,” is a riveting TimeLine Theatre world premiere that enlarges to two lives, one so stifled that she killed, the other pushed by personal demons to write a play about the murder. “Machinal,” Sophie Treadwell’s groundbreaking 1928 masterpiece, was inspired by the notorious trial of murderess Ruth Snyder, an unhappy wife who abetted her lover in the bludgeoning of her husband—and, in 1927, became the first woman to be electrocuted. “Machinal” established expressionism in America as it conveyed the soulessness of the machinery that grinds Snyder down ever lower–from woman to wife to goodtime girl to murderess to corpse.
Obolensky concentrates on the strange sisterly sympathy that Treadwell offered Snyder and her desperate deed. More schematic than dynamic, Treadwell’s curiosity about Snyder takes on an obsessive urgency that distances her from her male employers at the Herald-Tribune as well as her husband, a kindly man very different from Snyder’s allegedly abusive spouse. When accused of favoring Snyder, she replies, “What about not caring? Is that a bias?” For her the tragedy isn’t Snyder’s crime but the “daily submission of desire, ambition and need” that fueled it.
Treadwell displays all three drives in her dogged pursuit of her play, ending up hospitalized for neurasthenia, a diagnosis that seemed to confirm male stereotypes about female fragility. (Curiously, the play downplays the role of Snyder’s homicidal boyfriend, as if acknowledging his influence on the crime might weaken her argument of self-defense. But nothing destroys it as much as the double-indemnity life insurance policy that Snyder had taken out on her luckless husband.)
The most vivid moments in Nick Bowling’s irresistible staging are, curiously enough, the most conventional, the rapid-fire depictions of Snyder’s interrogation, trial by tabloid and horrendous execution (a sleazy reporter secretly photographed the moment of electrocution). The mental anguish Treadwell undergoes as Snyder’s plight tests her power to tame life into art seems necessarily more abstract.
Janet Ulrich Brooks’ Sophie works wonders to make it hurt as much to see as it did to feel. Brooks’ swift and certain performance, a feat of barely controlled anger and everything that’s the opposite of writer’s block, feeds on and fuels all the others—Mechelle Moe’s mysterious presence as the fictitious Snyder, Danica Ivancevic as the real husband-killer and David Parkes as Treadwell’s remarkably non-abusive husband. They, along with Andrew Hansen’s ferocious sound design and score, do as much for the play as an author could hope for and, because of the static storyline, even more so.
