Sophie Treadwell was an expert in dualities. Dualities were the name of the game for Treadwell: throughout her life, she simultaneously inhabited journalism and theater, urban and rural America, her Mexican and American heritage, the “well-made” play and the avant-garde. It is these dualities that make her a compelling figure to study today, but often hindered her from mainstream success during her lifetime.

Treadwell was born on October 3, 1885 in Stockton, California to Alfred and Nettie Treadwell. Alfred was of English and Mexican descent (although he grew up primarily in Mexico), and Nettie was of Scottish descent. When Treadwell was a toddler, her father abandoned her and her mother, and returned to his motherland of Mexico. For the rest of her life, Treadwell would deal with the emotional and financial implications of this desertion. Emotionally, Treadwell would watch her mother continued to pine for her father, which seems to have significantly colored her perceptions of marriage. (At the same time, however, Treadwell herself seems to have retained an affection for her father. She often visited him in Mexico, as well as pursued the same things that interested him—journalism and the theater.)

Financially, however, Alfred’s failure to contribute to her college education meant that Treadwell would struggle with working to pay her way through UC Berkeley. She did this while maintaining a multitude of extracurricular commitments: she acted in theater productions, wrote plays, and was on the track team. These activities seem to have eventually taken its toll on her: by the end of her college career she was hospitalized from a nervous breakdown, and she graduated with her class in absentia in 1906.

In 1910, she married William McGeehan, who at the time was already a well-known sports columnist at the San Francisco Bulletin. Immediately following this marriage, Treadwell was again hospitalized for a nervous condition, and with McGeehan her husband, he was in charge of the decisions regarding her hospitalization. McGeehan expressed exasperation at this decision,

In 1915, Treadwell moved out east to New York, where she maintained separate living conditions from her husband. It was in this time and place that Treadwell encountered the communities she would mainly be associated with for the rest of her life: namely, the Provincetown Theater Players, the Lucy Stone League, and the modernist clique of young artists which included Marcel Duchamp. It was also here that she dove into her journalism career in earnest, earning a reputation for her daring deeds in the name of getting a good story, in the same vein as other up and coming female journalists like Nellie Bly.

When World War I began, Treadwell travelled to the front lines to cover the action, but was denied access because she was a woman. Nevertheless, she stayed on to cover the rear guard,  referring to the mayhem she witnessed here as the “little war theater” in her coverage.

Treadwell drew upon her journalism career to write her most famous and successful play, Machinal, based on the conviction and execution of Ruth Snyder for the murder of her husband. The play in part deals with what Treadwell seems to have perceived to be the one-dimensional, unfair way in which the media portrayed Snyder, reflecting Treadwell’s own concerns about the larger state of journalistic integrity in America. Machinal was a critical success, and at the time of its release was hailed as one of the finest Expressionist dramas of its time, in a time when Expressionist dramas were at the peak of its emergence in American theater. A New York Times editorial about Machinal’s inaugural Broadway production in 1928 declared the play “so detached, impersonal and abstract that it seems timeless. In a hundred years it should still be vital and vivid.”[1]

Nevertheless, Machinal remained Treadwell’s only significant success on the Broadway stage—in part because Treadwell refused to fully take part in the Little Theater movement. Although she continued to write well into her 70s, by that time she had shifted to short fiction, and in these later years she spent some time in Vienna. Upon moving back to the States, she lived in Arizona with her adopted son. It was in Arizona that she died in February 20, 1970.

 

 

 

 

[1] Valgemae, Mardi. Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in the American Drama of the 1920s. Southern Illinois University Press, 1972.