The Cast Photo by Sara Erdman

Combustible Company, a Twin Cities theatre troupe with their own streak of independence and daring, is presenting a tightened (to fit the Fringe Festival's fifty-minute time stricture) but highly effective production of Machinal. The play has been adapted and directed by Renee Hatton, making a remarkable directorial debut. When the Fringe concludes, the company will take the show to the St. Croix Festival Theatre, about an hour drive from Minneapolis. If you miss this production at the Fringe, it–and the lovely scenery you'll pass on the way–make it worth the trip to St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin.

In Machinal, we are first immersed in a de-personalized, grueling industrial environment, a foundry of some sort where both industrial and clerical tasks are repeated with deadening monotony, all of this depicted in starkly choreographed stage movements. One officer worker, a young woman whose name we learn later, only incidentally, as if a name doesn't really matter because it could have been anyone, is late. She is disaffected, unable to fall into line as the others have, but needs a job. The other workers, whose boredom leads them to invent petty (but hurtful) intrigues, taunt her with the trouble she will have and point her transgressions out to the boss.

The boss then singles out our young woman for unwanted "special attention" and in short time proposes marriage–an offer, she realizes, she cannot refuse. Her opportunistic mother is no help. Of course, the marriage goes as badly as one would expect, even with, or maybe because of, the arrival of a baby. When the young woman–Helen, we overhear–has the chance, she slips into an affair. This opens her eyes to the life she wants to live, free of her boss/husband, and thus the plot thickens. There is a murder, a trial that the muckraking press turns into a media circus, and the finish. Helen wonders if she can finally have peace.

Between the scant lines of actual dialogue, the ensemble uses phrases, such as "another day, another dollar," like verbal tics, and pantomime the conduct of their work and their responses to the main events like marionettes controlled by invisible strings. A Lyra ring, the large metallic rings suspended on cables used by circus acrobats, is assembled and becomes Helen's refuge, the place where she can be herself–or at least explore who "herself" actually is. Her arc of increasingly liberated movement on the Lyra is choreographed by Lyra coach Brigid Boente.

Musical underscoring, most of it by no-royalties required composer of electronica, Kevin McLeod, anchors the plays progression tonally. Toward the end, cast members sing several songs with obvious pertinence to the ratcheting plot: "Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair" is given a rousing music hall delivery by Lily Jones, with Ella Eastman-Kiesow providing a thumping guitar accompaniment; "Cielito Lindo" is beautifully sung by Ella Eastman-Kiesow and Nitalia Michelle; and "O Death" is sung by the entire ensemble, in particularly moving form. Hatton, as if she didn't have enough to do, took on music and sound design, with splendid results.

The only character developed with any depth is the young woman, adroitly played with an abiding sense of fatalism by Anna Pladson. The other defined roles–the Husband (Alvaro Araque Junior), the Mother (Lily Jones), the Lover (Matthew Wilhelm), and the Doctor (Michael DiPrima)–are played as flat archetypes, as befits the play's stylized presentation.

Of Treadwell's seven plays that made it to Broadway, Machinal is the only one that lasted more than a month, playing 91 performances during its 1928 run (a 2014 limited run revival by Roundabout Theatre Company had about the same length of run). The play itself was thought to be inspired by a notorious 1927 murder case Treadwell had covered as a New York journalist, in which Ruth Snyder, found guilty of killing her husband, was the first woman in New York to be executed by electric chair. Critics at the time opined that, while the Snyder case was a tawdry affair, Machinal was an elevated study of the emotions and social constraints that can lead a woman to such desperate measures. New York Times theatre critic Brooks Atkinson wrote, "the author, actors and producer of Machinal ... have with great skill managed to retrieve a frail and somber beauty of character."

That beauty and sense of the fragility of the human spirit is abundantly present in Combustible Company's production. Hatton has previously been involved in numerous Combustible projects, informing her adaptation and direction of Machinal to mesh with the company's strong physicality and use of striking stage imagery.

I have not, over the years, been an avid Fringe-goer, but Machinal is the kind of gem tucked within the Fringe's busy schedule that makes the festival worth checking out. Perhaps Combustible will be kind enough to mount a return engagement for those without the fortitude to brave the Fringe, nor the transport to get to St. Croix Falls.

Machinal, a Combustible Company production, runs through August 16, 2026, at the Minnesota Fringe Festival, Southern Theater, 1420 Washington Avenue South, Minneapolis, and August 20 2026, - August 23, 2026, at the St. Croix Festival Theatre, 125 N. Washington St., St. Croix Falls WI. For tickets and information, please visit www.combustiblecompany.org.

Playwright: Sophie Treadwell, adapted by Renee Hatton; Director: Renee Hatton ; Lighting Design: Alex Clark, Noah Carlson, Evelyn Kelly; Sound and Music Design: Renee Hatton; Lyra Coach and Choreographer: Brigid Boente; Stage Manager: Lizzy Rooney; Producer: Kym Longhi.

Cast: Alvaro Araque, Jr. (Husband/ensemble), Michael DiPrima (Doctor/ensemble), Ella Eastman-Kiesow (ensemble), Ella Hendrickson (ensemble), Lily Jones (Mother/ensemble), Nitalia Michelle (ensemble), Anna Pladson (Young Woman/ensemble), Vincent Strunk (ensemble), Gavin Wells (ensemble), Matthew Wilhelm (Lover/ensemble).