BY KEN CHISHOLM
A little over a month ago, actor, playwright, director, and librettist Lindsay Thompson was commenting on the CBC Radio Information Morning’s year end arts panel how theatre audiences were a little too promiscuous with their standing ovation.
Thompson has the lead role in the Cape Breton University Boardmore Theatre’s production of Sophie Treadwell’s stark 1920’s murder drama, Machinal, and she, and her cast-mates and director–in fact the entire production–earned their standing ovation with a bravura, layered, socially conscious, emotionally draining production.
Treadwell was a journalist as well as playwright and she used the murder trial of Ruth Snyder (the O. J. Simpson case of its day) as a foundation for her stage play.
An unnamed young woman (Thompson) working a rote office job attracts the attention of her older male boss who, much to the amusement and envy of her office-mates, believes she will be a proper wife for him. The young woman has no romantic feelings for him, but, as her money-conscious mother points out, they could certainly use the financial security.
The union produces a single child, a daughter minus the golden curls the young woman conjured in her adolescent fantasies. The young woman drifts into the arms of a charming adventurer, experiences a moment of freedom, and finds the thought of spending the rest of her life in the cloying embrace of her husband unbearable. She commits a horrific act, becomes a media sensation at a sensationalistic trial, but finally is given one last opportunity to “not submit” before her sentence is executed.
The set, designed and executed by the talented Cheryl Bray, was a profusion of cogs: some painted, some cut-outs, some animated projections. Along with moving set pieces that transformed the performing space from an office to a chintz honeymoon hotel suite to a prison cell, the set and props were a mixture of the realistic and the highly-stylized. The design throughout caught the flavour of Treadwell’s equal mix of bland and artfully-heightened dialogue.
The large cast doubled as stage crew and “atmosphere” but all had a moment to shine and they were full of “character” even in moments when the spotlight was elsewhere onstage; if one’s eyes drifted off to periphery of the action, whomever one’s glance fell upon would be fully in the scene, wordlessly adding to the overall energy of the production.
Tony Hajjar had three plum roles as the smirking “Adding Clerk”, an oily, predatory speakeasy patron with an ominous penchant for Poe, and a 1920’s edition of the Simpson’s trial Judge Ito. Kathleen O’Toole was a delight as “Telephone Girl”, the party girl with the Kewpie Doll voice. Wilma Menzies was both pitiful and grating (as called for by the script) as the young woman’s “Mother”, a wrecked and drained version of what her daughter might have ended up becoming.
Todd Hiscock as “Prosecutor” and Mike McPhee as “Defense Lawyer”, both playing to the boys in the press box as much as the citizens in the jury box (represented by the audience), gave sly, laser-focused performances that were fun to watch. Gena DiFlavio, as “Nurse” and “Prison Matron”, gave both of her characters different flavours of sympathy for their ward until overruled by their male superiors. Michael G. MacDonald as “Doctor” clearly enjoyed being the authority on child bearing and rearing, and telling women what their responsibilities are.
Franklin McKibbon as “George H. Jones”, the young woman’s doomed husband, and Gary Walsh, as “Priest”, were strong in uncomprehending, bookended roles. McKibbon’s “George” is full of Dale Carnegie, self-improvement platitudes while Walsh’s invocation of scripture had the same kind of rote emotion. Both of them found the young woman in stressful, dire circumstances and could not hear her cries for help.
Steven Peters as “First Man” in the programme, and “Richard Roe” in the dialogue, delivered a nuanced, ingenuous performance. It’s a difficult role: seemingly, “Roe” represents an open prison cell door for the young woman. Sexual freedom, emotional sustenance, the discovery of beauty in a squalid one-room apartment, he seems the perfect partner. But he’s also a rogue, a seducer, an avoider of commitment except to his own pleasure, a liar who lies by telling the truth and letting his lover find her own meaning in his words, and ultimately a betrayer. Peters’ performance caught all of these elements.
Thompson’s performance as the “Young Woman” stands as one of the most emotionally-draining, captivating, smartly considered acting performances I’ve ever seen. Thompson had to play both subtly written “naturalistic” scenes (when she asked for her mother right before consummating her marriage, it broke my heart) to wild expressionistic scenes of interior monologue. At first, Thompson’s performance is full of robotic head jerks and verbal repetitions that are almost painful to watch in the monologue scenes that gradually morph into more lyrical, existential questioning as the young woman becomes more aware of her own choices. Because we see her private thoughts, Thompson’s layered, raw performance allows the audience to see her character as both victim and perpetrator (for all of his loutishness, her husband does not deserve his fate) but also as something more: a tragic figure not from a character defect but from the defect of a materialistic, increasingly rationally mechanized society that can only deal with non-conformity with judicially endorsed murder.
Rod Nicholls–as director–had a difficult though prescient script, some daunting set changes and a large cast built around a huge technically-challenging lead performance and he brought it all together almost flawlessly. There were no lazy performances. The individual scenes always felt fresh, cleanly blocked, and with lighting (designed by the invaluable Ken Heaton) perfectly focused and emphasizing the emotional content of the scene. Many of the audience at the Friday night performance I attended looked and mentioned how emotionally fraught they were from the ninety-minute performance. Nicholls not only brought a rare philosophical insight into this production, he also brought a full-blooded empathy for all of the characters of Treadwell’s script. The one flaw was an over-reliance on prerecorded voices under the scenes: with so many in the cast, my preference would have been for live vocal performances, especially at the final scene where electric chair operators cavalierly comment on their work, which I not only had problems hearing but left the lone actor onstage with little to do for what seemed a very long time.
Machinal is one of the strongest Boardmore Theatre productions in a decade, due a lot to Lindsay Thompson’s heroic performance and the efforts of a committed, talented cast and crew and a director able to access all of the ideas and emotions in a challenging script
