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Arts & Entertainment

Real-Life Drama

A woman pays the ultimate price for passion in "Machinal" by Rutgers Theater Company

On Jan. 12, 1928, a woman named Ruth Snyder was executed by electric chair at Sing Sing prison in New York. Her death sentence came after she was convicted of murdering her husband, Albert, and her trial became a media sensation, capped by a legendary photo of Snyder in the electric chair on the cover of the New York Daily News.

Snyder’s case became the basis for Sophie Treadwell’s play, “Machinal,” an expressionist classic that is being performed by Rutgers Theater Company for a run beginning Sept. 30 and continuing through Oct. 8.

The production is the senior thesis for director Melissa Firlit, who is in the MFA program at Mason Gross School of Arts at Rutgers. And while “Machinal” may not be the most famous of plays, it’s one that has fascinated Firlit since she first read it 10 years ago.

Treadwell was a journalist, playwright and actress, whose accomplishments included interviewing the Mexican revolutionist Pancho Villa. According to Firlit, Treadwell was fascinated by Snyder’s story and wanted to know what could lead a woman to do what Snyder did. That led to a play about how people, particularly women, became a cog in a mechanical world. 

In the expressionist play, a Young Woman (played by Kristen Adele) is in a loveless marriage and finds a new lease on life when she has an affair. Feeling trapped, she murders her husband. The play is told through nine “episodes” or scenes, exploring various phases of the woman’s life. 

“It is kind of challenging but it’s also very exciting to figure out how you want to tell the story and how you want the audience to experience the story,” Firlit says. “So you really need to make sure everyone you’re working with – all the research and which direction you can go – leads you to a way that you all believe is a solid way to tell it, and to support and enhance it and not bog it down. To still have the freedom that this is a world where anything can happen but this is what’s happening at this time.”

Firlit says the challenges within “Machinal” are one of the reasons she wanted to take it on.

“I thought, What better way to test out what I’m learning and what better way to work on something that I’ve always wanted to get my fingers on, and that I thought was worthy of the budget and design elements I would be given to do it,” Firlit says.

Though she’s read the play several times, Firlit has never seen a full production of it, though she has seen students act out scenes from it in class and has watched clips from it on YouTube.

“I find that it hasn’t bogged me down or gotten in the way of how I want to tell the story, or made me feel like I have an expectation of myself,” she says. “I’m just really trying to find why it speaks to me and why I feel we need to tell it now.”

One of the choices made by Firlit, who grew up in upstate New York, was to present the play with a mixed-race cast. The main character is played by an African American woman, partly because Firlit wanted to present a world that is colorless.

Kristen Adele, who’s studying acting at Mason Gross, is playing the Young Woman. Adele and Firlit have known each other for two years, and the actress first heard about the play from the director. 

“When I did read it, I was blown away at how relevant it still is today,” Adele says. “And the fact that I had never read it was astonishing to me because I’ve been studying theater since I was an undergrad. I’m excited to be doing it so that more people can be exposed to it. A lot of people haven’t heard of it and it’s so timely.”

Playing the Young Woman is offering Adele a chance to explore a wide range of emotions in a character.

“There’s everything, it’s a full snapshot of a human being fighting over a period of 6, 7 years,” she says. “You see it all, from the relationship with her mother, then having her own child, the relationship with her husband, the relationship with her lover. It’s all there: joy, pain, fear, love.”

Firlit says “Machinal” is known in academic circles but isn’t often performed, and that people should take advantage of a chance to see, rather than be put off by it because they aren’t familiar with it.

“I tell people, ‘Treat yourself,’” she says. “It really is exciting and evocative and dangerous and epic and a full piece of theater.”

“Machinal” will be performed from Sept. 30 through Oct. 8 at the Philip J. Levin Theater in the Mason Gross Performing Arts Center, 85 George St. (between Route 18 and Ryders Lane) on the Douglass Campus of Rutgers in New Brunswick.

Tickets cost $25, $20 for seniors and Rutgers alumni and employees, and $15 for students with valid ID.

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For information, go to MasonGross.Rutgers.edu or call 732-932-7511.

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