Lack of Emotion Dulls the Dramatics of ‘Machinal’

Never a group to tread water, the Chandler Studio Theatre Company has changed its name to the Action/Reaction Theatre Company.

Now, Action/Reaction doesn’t exactly fly off the tongue, but the real question is what people will think of director Michael Holmes’ staging of Sophie Treadwell’s long-forgotten 1928 Expressionist tragedy, “Machinal.”

Actually, the group name change is purely practical--for its new tax-exempt status, Holmes says. And, besides, what would they call themselves if they ever moved from their tiny storefront spot on Chandler Boulevard in North Hollywood?

Holmes’ staging here is also practical. The play’s 30 roles offer a lot of work for the burgeoning company (the show’s 21-member cast is probably three times the size of nearly every previous production here), and Holmes stages everything in minimalist black down to Don Nelson’s costumes, with minimal set pieces.

It’s all designed to prevent any distraction from the actors, and in the first moments, Holmes has his ensemble slowly come together to create the illusion of a huge, chugging machine with just body movements and voice inflections.

Treadwell’s tragedy is about how the mechanical nature of modern life drives people to desperate measures. Holmes’ actors suggest less a deus ex machina than a dance of death.

Alas, this may be the show’s most intriguing moment. Whether it is an off-key reading of the text by everyone involved, or Treadwell’s stylized voice, this “Machinal” is awkwardly remote, almost totally resistant to any emotional connection. There’s no cerebral relief either, since the play becomes an intellectually obvious agitprop work with a morally dubious message.

Treadwell’s heroine Helen (Johanna Parker) goes from being a worker-unit in some sort of corporation partly managed by George H. Jones (John Beckman), to George’s alienated wife, to indifferent mother, to wife looking for a lover, to murdering wife executed in the electric chair.

The characters declare themselves in a self-consciously stylized way, but never in a way you quite believe. Despite Parker’s best efforts, Helen’s repeated cries that she’s going crazy or yearning to be free have no weight of emotional truth behind them.

This tends to crush the tragedy’s impact, to the point where we’re actually kind of satisfied that Helen’s homicidal response to a dull but hardly horrific marriage gets a form of rough justice.

Prior to the offstage killing, Holmes stages Helen and George at a comically long dinner table, like the famous dining table sequence in “Citizen Kane.” But George is no Kane-like monster; Beckman instead plays him as amusingly arrogant. And his murder strikes us as truly mad, not some viscerally satisfying revenge.

It’s a major problem when the playwright’s art and politics get in the way of good dramatic sense. (Treadwell meant to meld a crude feminism with the modernism of a Wyndham Lewis.) With the exception of Anthony Holiday’s welcome subdued performance as Helen’s one-night stand, Holmes’ actors, as they rarely do, feel trapped in this impossible play.

BE THERE

“Machinal,” Action/Reaction Theatre Company, 12443 Chandler Blvd., North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Aug. 30. $12.50. (818) 908-4094.