Over the weekend, Union University’s MainStage hosted an adaptation of Sophie Treadwell’s “Machinal,” which was the first fully student-directed production since the start of the student organization in 2022. The show ran from February 22-24 in the W.D. Powell theater.
After Union’s theater department closed its doors to incoming freshmen in the fall of 2022, students quickly rallied together in an attempt to salvage what they could of the over 100-year-old program. What emerged was MainStage: a fully student lead theater organization designed to keep live theater on Union’s campus indefinitely.
“Mary Hardy, who was the president of Alpha Psi Omega, her and her senior class of theater majors basically got all the logistics out of the way,” Maren Taylor, junior nursing major and MainStage’s first student president, said. “They found an advisor, they wrote the constitution, they elected and then they put on a show!”
Since the MainStage’s beginning approximately two years ago, “Machinal” was the first show to be produced by an entirely student team. In 2023, the organization brought in a guest director to aid the organization’s learning process and kickstart the organization’s legacy.
Director Maren Taylor is a Union student who got heavily involved with MainStage purely out of her passion for theater. In her minimal free time over the past year, Taylor has worked long and hard to get “Machinal” into its final form.
“I went through three edits of the script,” Taylor said. “We just cleaned up the show so that my vision could come out and it would be authentic to [playwright Sophie Treadwell’s] script and authentic to this young woman’s story, but also I could make it my own a little bit.”
Loosely based on American murderer Ruth Snyder, “Machinal” tells the story of a young woman Helen who is stuck in her life unable to find the peace, freedom and rest that she so fervently desires. Throughout the play, Helen grows more disdainful for her marriage and office job and more obsessed with the taste of freedom she receives from her affair and the stories her lover tells her. Taylor believes that Helen never achieves true freedom, which can only be found through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
In the show’s program, Taylor writes, “The young woman presented in this show lived a life seeking love, freedom and peace, however it was always outside of Christ… She was led in wrong directions and walked willingly into darkness.”
In a climactic moment during the play, Helen grasps at her hair, the couch next to her and finally the floor beneath her screaming over and over, “I won’t submit, I won’t submit!” While viewing the scene, audiences are forced to ask themselves if they too are grasping at desires and refusing to submit to the God who gives us the desires of our hearts.
“This show is probably already controversial for some people,” Taylor said, “but I want it to be a good kind of uncomfortable. Sin is uncomfortable. If you ever see sin anywhere in the world it should make you uncomfortable.”
Taylor later writes, “No matter how much we try to avoid the hard or uncomfortable things that exist, it does not make them any less real. ‘Machinal’ holds a mirror up to the things we often try to ignore.”
