In the production of Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, directed by Ianthe Demos, the play begins before the play begins. The audience entering the theater sees the Young Woman (Ariane Barbanell) seated on the stage, encircled by a group of men bearing down on her. The silent tableau makes its point. Loosely based on the life of convicted murderer Ruth Snyder, the play describes itself as "a story of a young woman who murders her husband—an ordinary young woman, any woman." This young woman is driven to a desperate act by the oppressiveness of a patriarchal society that drains the life out of her even before she faces execution.

Treadwell’s stage directions also state that "The Hope is to create a stage production that will have ‘style.’" The production by One Year Lease, a young company dedicated to revitalizing classic texts, achieves that end. The set design by James Hunting features three metal ladders bolted securely to the stage. The actors in this expressionist drama must hang and drape themselves from the ladders, and with the metal platform lit from below (by Mike Riggs), this makes for a striking and effective use of the space. Costume designer Kay Lee has dressed the men in the same dark, vaguely militaristic uniforms, suggesting a world dehumanized to the point where all individual touches have been lost. The women are dressed in simple shifts, the only color being the different shaded waistbands they wear, again an effective way of suggesting the mindless sameness of the world of Machinal, a word which in French means mechanical.

The acting may not always be up to the inventiveness of the production, but Treadwell’s play, written in 1928, does not rely on intricate character development. Rather, it sets up a series of events to which the characters react. As the Young Woman, Ariane Barbanell seems to be operating at the same level of despair from the first scene. She has reason to despair: the Young Woman endures a nagging mother, a dehumanizing job, a loveless marriage, reluctant motherhood, and the love and loss of the only person she ever loved. Barbanell’s task is complicated by some of Treadwell’s speeches; at the end of Episode Four, a long and fragmented monologue about drowned puppies and loving God is difficult to decipher in the reading, much less the playing, and would challenge any actress. Barbanell does raise the level of anguish in the final scene when the Young Woman, who refuses to submit any more, is forced into submission by a final indignity.

Each of other actors plays more than one part, and the most successful of these is Marie-Pierre Beausejour, who creates very three different characters. Beausejour evens finds some poignancy in the plight of the Young Woman’s nagging mother. After criticizing her daughter for wearing gloves while washing the dishes to protect "my lady’s hands," she repeats the line while looking at her own dishpan hands and conveys the sadness of what this lady’s life has become over the last forty years. And while it is clear why the Young Woman prefers her handsome, blonde lover (Durand Ford) to her stodgy husband (Bill Coelius), Coelius does not make the husband entirely uncompelling. Although he has fat hands and may cause his wife to flinch at his touch, the husband, as a stand-in for the patriarchy, does not seem to justify murder, which adds an interesting dimension to the triangle. Yet, you know that the Young Woman is doomed when the same actor plays the murder victim and the presiding judge. Having the Young Woman’s lines alternate between all the female characters in the trial scene cleverly reinforces the idea that this is not just one, but every woman on trial.