Treadwell, Sophie

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TREADWELL, Sophie

Born 5 October 1885, Stockton, California; died 20 February, Tuscon, Arizona

Daughter of Alfred B. and Nellie Fairchild Treadwell

Sophie Treadwell was the only child of a pioneer California family. From her father, a judge whose maternal grandmother had raised him in Mexico, Treadwell inherited a passion for all things Spanish and Mexican.

During her years at the University of California at Berkeley, from which she graduated in 1906, Treadwell wrote some one-act plays and acted both on campus and in little theaters in nearby Oakland. Then after one year as a teacher in a one-room school at Yankee Jims, in the Mother Lode Country—where she impressed the natives with her insistence on feminist ideas—Treadwell returned to San Francisco, to work as a reporter on the San Francisco Bulletin, soon becoming a feature writer with her own byline. She attained verisimilitude for her "sob stories" by masquerading, for example, as a prostitute in order to prove the established churches gave "only a stone" to the poor unfortunate women who "asked for bread."

In 1910 Treadwell married a sports writer for the San Francisco Chronicle; in 1915, she went with him to New York, where he took a position with the New York Herald Tribune. The connection served Treadwell well; she persuaded the Herald Tribune newspaper to send her to Europe as a war correspondent during World War I.

Treadwell continued to write plays; by 1920 she had written nearly three dozen. In 1921 she used her Mexican connection to secure the only American interview with Pancho Villa at his ranch near Durango, Mexico. This visit resulted in her first professionally produced Broadway play, Gringo (1922). Throughout the rest of the decade, Treadwell concentrated on work for the theater. Plumes in the Dust, the story of Edgar Allan Poe, was originally written for John Barrymore but ultimately produced in 1936 with Henry Hull in the lead.

Treadwell's most successful effort, Machinal (1928), also was the result of her newspaper work—as a reporter covering the infamous Snyder-Gray murder case in 1927. Machinal provided the first starring role for the then-unknown Clark Gable. The play was staged in England and in many European cities, including two productions in Moscow. Treadwell was the first American playwright to be paid royalties in the U.S.S.R.

In 1938, insisting on the potential for achieving the "good life" through a return to traditional American values, Treadwell wrote Hope for a Harvest. When the play was produced in 1941, with Frederic March in the lead, it was rejected by a public that, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, no longer agreed that a simple return to farm life and hard work could be the solution to all problems.

Throughout most of the 1950s Treadwell lived in Spain, continuing to write and rewrite her plays. A novel was published in 1959. A careful craftsman, Treadwell never relinquished hope for another box office success to equal that of Machinal, and she left many versions of a great number of efforts in this direction. The only play produced in her final years was Now He Doesn 't Want to Play, set in Mexico. Even at eighty, Treadwell was actively engaged in the production at the University of Arizona, working with the director and rewriting throughout rehearsals, in the vain hope the play would go to Broadway. As it turned out, Treadwell was destined to be remembered only for Machinal, which in itself is no small accomplishment.

In "real life" both lovers, Snyder and Gray, were found guilty of the murder of Snyder's husband and executed. But, with consumate skill, Treadwell concentrates in Machinal on the woman, making her female protagonist a genuinely universal character, a simple person, frustrated in every relationship through no fault of her own. Ultimately, the killing of her husband becomes an almost symbolic act—committed to free herself from a mechanistic world with which she cannot cope. She is very nearly acquitted, but the prosecutor reads aloud a deposition from her absent lover, now living in Mexico, in which he "tells all." This final, callous disregard for their relationship elicits a tortured admission of guilt, and the young woman goes to her death without understanding how the sin of murder made her "free and not afraid for one minute." Machinal was done on BBC-TV in England and on several American television programs in the 1950s. When it was revived at the off-Broadway Gate Theatre in 1960, it won the Vernon Rice Award.

Machinal, an eloquent statement about the stultifying effects of the mechanization and meaninglessness of the modern world and the lack of human concern for others, is a fitting obituary for Treadwell, a woman who strove passionately throughout her long life for the right to be an individual dedicated to old-fashioned humanistic principles.

Other Works:

Oh, Nightingale (1925). Lone Valley (1933). One Fierce Hour and Sweet (1959).

There is a collection of Sophie Treadwell's unpublished plays at the University of Arizona, Tuscon.

Bibliography:

Gassner, J., Best American Plays (Early Series, 1900). Himelstein, M. Y., Drama was a Weapon (1976). Mantle, B., Best Plays, 1928 (1929). Ross, I., Ladies of the Press (1936).