It has been said that the secondary goal of newspapers is to inform the public, but that their primary mission is to sell newspapers. Sophie Treadwell wasn't as cynical as her colleagues, despite her experience as a trial reporter covering domestic homicides during the razzle-dazzle 1920s. Incensed at the stereotyping of female suspects as heartless vixens, but unable to secure a forum for her protests, Treadwell instead wrote a play pleading a case for mitigating circumstances leading otherwise law-abiding matrons to violence.
That play, titled Machinal and premiering in 1928, recounts the story of “an ordinary woman” beset by social pressures—a sick parent, a lecherous boss who persuades her to marry him, a lover who will ultimately betray her—until she can see no escape but mariticide. Though the character in based in no small part on Ruth Snyder, the first woman sentenced to death by electrocution, Masha Obolensky's biodrama reveals Treadwell's fictional heroine to have been a conglomerate of several abused wives encountered by the author in the practice of her trade.
Memoirs being the hot-sellers of our generation, it would be easy to invoke the autobiographical angle: Wasn't Treadwell also the sole support of her mother, in an age when a dutiful daughter's most available recourse was to marry well? Didn't she also suffer nervous breakdowns aggravated by stress? ( Nowadays, we call this condition “clinical depression,” but in those days, it was “neurasthenia”—a “women's disease” resulting from excessive intellectual stimulation. ) But Treadwell did not choose as her unfortunate sisters did, instead forging herself a career steeped in feminist principles and personal independence, with the wholehearted encouragement of a likewise progressive-minded husband.
The act of writing being largely a physically passive pastime, Obolensky might be forgiven the frequency of her protagonist's descent into often harrowing, but certainly kinetic, fantasies blurring fact and fiction in her imagination—a process veering dangerously close to the cliché of the obsessively empathetic female artist—and making Treadwell's devoted spouse the voice of reason in an emotionally charged universe. But as played by Janet Ulrich Brooks, Treadwell—whose adventures included stints as a front-line war correspondent and undercover investigative agent—emerges as a creature both steely and sensitive. Under Nick Bowling's direction, David Parkes, Mechelle Moe, Danica Ivancevic, Terry Hamilton and Zach Kenney all deliver vivid and varied portraits of the obligatory advocates and adversaries, but it is Sophie whom we go home glad to have met.
