COMING SOON: Machinal At The George H. Jones Company
Sophie Treadwell’s Expressionist classic gets the promenade treatment from a teen run theatre in Westchester County
A student run theatre company in Westchester County, New York, Valley Road Theatre Company, is tackling a 1928 play this weekend and giving it a non-traditional staging. Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal has been revived a few times since its Broadway debut and often makes critics lists of best plays with revivals drawing big names to the productions.
With a two night stand that fits the story into promenade format, the teens of Valley Road Theatre Company are looking to explore the Expressionist classic in a whole new format.
Valley Road Theatre Company’s founder & Artistic Director Alex Gross reached out to us about the production which runs May 10th & 11th.
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NO PROSCENIUM: Tell us a little bit about your experience! What’s it about? What makes it immersive?
Alex Gross: Valley Road Theatre Company’s production of Machinal takes the 1928 play by Sophie Treadwell and rips it open — inviting the audience into the desolate, industrial world of the text across 4000+ square feet of a 19th-century church. Our production combines open-world promenade with theatre-in-the-surround, luring the audience into our central offices for the main performance after fever-dream sequences across the venue.
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Machinal itself is a forgotten American classic, widely circulated but uncommonly produced. We’ve taken the text, often performed with a cast of over a dozen, and stripped the dialogue down to 6 core ensemble members. It’s a big step for our company, which is formed entirely by teens, into immersive on this scale.
NP: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experience?
AG: If there’s a central theme behind the work Valley Road Theatre Company produces, it’s adapting traditional performance through the eyes and minds of teen performers and creatives. For us, our productions are about funneling theatrical relics (text, character, space, time) into modern interpretations that best represent how we experience reality. As we began Machinal, the text naturally led us down a path to promenade immersion: What better way to capture the rapid, machine-like expressionist dialogue than throwing our audience directly into the hectic lives of our characters?
NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about this latest experience?
AG: The production’s two main sections are split between standing/walking and sitting. This allows us to devise promenade scenes directly from the main text, and depending on which characters a guest may choose to follow once entering the venue, they will interpret the seated portion differently. There is nothing to ‘miss,’ rather each exploration yields a unique bias once seated, purposefully different for each guest. Plus, each of our performer’s tracks have been designed to accommodate varying levels of emotional and physical arcs, and we encourage our guests to gravitate toward the scenes and characters they feel most connected to.
NP: Once you started designing and testing what did you discover about this experience that was unexpected?
AG: By devising directly from the text, we’ve let the characters embrace reality outside the traditional 9 scenes of Machinal. Developing silent promenade scenes develops spoken scenes from the text by proxy, and vice versa. Then, when transitioning from studio rehearsals to our site-specific venue, each moment has adapted individually as the entire company tackles unexpected nooks, stairs, and furniture.
NP: What can fans who are coming to this, or thinking about coming to this, do to get into the mood of the experience?
AG: Listen to the soundtrack! The space is liminal, stretching from the 1920s through the modern day, and the soundtrack reflects that. In the first 10 minutes, a guest can go from experiencing 1930s blues to 60s rock to modern ambient. We also encourage our audiences to check out our past work on our website.
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