American Theater 

The explosive theater movements that had already taken over Europe had yet to fully cross over into America when Treadwell began her career. For the most part, American theater—Broadway, in particular—was still steeped in melodramatic traditions.

As such, expressionism in America was largely formulated as a response to these traditions, leading to the tendency of calling any play that wasn’t overtly melodramatic “expressionist”.  This anti-traditional melodrama movement primarily occurred on the fringes of Broadway through the aforementioned little theater movement, primarily through the Provincetown Players, and while it was true that the company was the site of expressionist innovation, a significant amount of its productions hewed toward realism.

In addition to this, by the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, theater was grappling with the fundamental divisions between the women’s rights movement. Plays grappled with the concept of marriage and whether marriage and the liberation of the New Woman could be reconciled.

 

 

Treadwell’s Theater 

Sophie Treadwell learned from actress Helena Modjeska to, as much as possible, exercise total creative control over her work. While this refusal to acquiesce to outside output caused its own fair share of difficulties in her career, it was also what led her to become “the only writer-producer-actress on Broadway”, often spearheading productions of her own plays.

The Little Theater movement was certainly conducive to this emerging model of a playwright-headed theater. Susan Glaspell, in particular, had put up the Provincetown Players specifically to give playwrights to experiment while retaining total control over their work, away from pressures to make a “commercial” play on Broadway. However, Treadwell eschewed the little theaters, and mostly fought to have her plays produced on Broadway. This was despite the fact that she also refused to edit her play for commercial tastes, or to publish her works under a male pseudonym to avoid female prejudice.

Machinal

Treadwell’s main collaborator on her most successful play, Machinal were notoriously opposed to realism. Arthur Hopkins, who staged the play’s inaugural Broadway production, wanted to “stimulate the unconscious”, thereby eliminating anything that would activate the conscious. It was this theory that served to create the final image of Machinal, described as “overhead lights…first faint blue, then red, then pink, then amber…” Treadwell also articulated these same theories in her stage directions for Machinal, writing phrases such as the “relaxed meditating mind” and her desire for the use of sound to activate “still secret places, in the consciousness of the audience.”

Little of Treadwell’s remaining work bears any resemblance to Machinal  and its more expressionist tendencies.  For example, her play immediately following Machinal, entitled Ladies Leave, was subtitled “A Modern Comedy of Morals”, and hits its high point when a young wife rejects both her husband and lover to move to Vienna. (Scandalous.) Nevertheless, in the same way that Machinal can be connected to Treadwell’s experiences in journalism, the rest of her works can be connected to her personal experiences. Ladies Leave similarly deals with the double standard of morality imposed upon women.  In Nightingale, she portrays an ultimate desire for a husband that is a protector rather than a lover.