It is not a sexy, song-and-dance-filled story of a murderess. Renee Zellweger will not appear to surprise us with good acting and a terrific little cha cha cha. (Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Roxie Hart!) Nor is our murderess a vamp, a la Hedda Gabler, coolly pressing a pistol into the hand of the drunk.

Machinal is not an easy play, but Expressionist plays never are. They are filled invariably with shrieking and father-killing and starkness, like the Doors’ “The End,” but without Jim Morrison showing his wee. Sophie Treadwell, an early 20th century journalist and playwright, was considered along with Eugene O’Neill a leading light of the genre, and she certainly had it down—the shrieking, the patricide (in this case, the dead daddy is our heroine’s husband, while Mother is Treadwell’s usual manipulative monster—Treadwell’s relationship with her own mother is best described as “strained”), the fist raised against the heavens.

It was a fictionalized version of a true story—Ruth Snyder did indeed kill her husband and get the chair, but Treadwell’s 1928 version of her life seems to have at least as much Treadwell as Snyder in it, at least as far as loveless marriages and mothers go. Our heroine is ever buffeted by a victim’s fate—here she is with her monstrous, cold mother; here she is with great sadness marrying her fat-handed boss; here she is a post-partum Brooke Shields, but at least without Tom Cruise to deal with; and here she is with her lover man, her first happiness, for whom she will kill the husband whose groping hands turn her own blood to ice. Freedom! At last!

Treadwell—dontcha know it?—blames society or something.

In real life, poor buffeted, victimy Ruth Snyder did manage to take out $48,000 in insurance on old Fat Hands before she did her dastardly deed.

Cal State Long Beach’s production of Machinal is not easy either—in the first place, it runs an hour and 50 without an intermission. In the second place, sometimes people wear masks, like they’re Kubrick run wild. Things are sing-songy, goosesteppy, ultra-mannered, and really weird. One expects a Brecht/Weill dirge any moment.

Take that damn pipe out of your mouth, you rat.

Still, though, for a play from 1928? Never would have expected the restaurant scene where one table focuses on a guy trying to seduce another guy with loaded talk of Poe and Amontillado; the second table has a guy trying to talk his chick into an abortion; the third table features trysting cheaters; and another couple will totally murder someone. That is one hell of a restaurant! Damn, Sophie Treadwell!

Director Trevor Biship, who has directed at South Coast Repertory and the Utah Shakespearean Festival, seems a little in love with our heroine as written—in a statement, he compared the boxes in which society has stuffed her to the way we treat Hillary Clinton. Me, I just saw a bad batch of crazy—most especially the first time she dallies with her lover and immediately starts in on “forever,” while he is all like, “Dude?” Acted very well by Marisa Duchowny, who swings between frozen doe and screaming mimi awesomely, she is abetted by her lover, Ali Sohaili, who gives off nothing so much as a Ralph Macchio vibe. Still, my heartstrings remain untugged. Yes, you’re sad. Yes, you’re crazy. Yes, you finally got a hot piece of ass, and your metaphorical lily is blooming at last. But while murder as personal empowerment—as though it were a makeover or going back to grad school—may have flown in the anarcho-syndicalistic and first-wave-feminist ’20s, it flies less steadily today.

Tags: cal state long beach, machinal, renee zellweger, sophie treadwell, theatre