The performing arts, namely theatrical productions, offer a precise insight into the state of the human condition. Toledo’s prominent educational institutions, the University of Toledo and Owens Community College are no strangers to the power of stage production. The last plays of the season were “Machinal” and “Recent Tragic Events,” both fundamental productions, yet almost completely opposite in style and construction.
UT’s “Machinal” was an abstract illustration of the struggle between heart and mind. Through a combination of live performance and video art, “Machinal” criticized the imbalance of society from the eyes of an unempowered woman, Helen Jones, played by Betsy Yeary. Her character is a representation of women struggling to find their identity in a world full of dehumanization.
Owens’ “Recent Tragic Events,” in contrast, is more concrete with its meaning. The play takes place in a Minneapolis apartment the night after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Waverly Wilson, played by Jess Kraus, waits patiently for a call from her mother that will answer whether or not her twin sister, Wendy, was killed during the attack.
As far apart as the stories are in each play, they both compare distinct modes of humanity. “Machinal,” on one hand, speaks of how much degradation a person can handle before they snap. In her performance, Yeary demonstrates how excruciating living a life of lies can be. She screams and cries in the spirit of a broken heart. Kraus, on the other hand, shows a woman learning to deal with herself in a state of uncontrolled trauma. It is hard to take your eyes off her as she communicates the pain of losing a twin sister during a societal crisis. “Recent Tragic Events” also portrays what people can handle before they reach a breaking point, only with a less abstract, more historic method of story telling.
“Machinal” uses industrialization and repetition to illustrate how a person reaches insanity. The set and costume design are almost purely mechanical, used the imagery of gears and machines to instill a sense of inescapability. “Recent Tragic Events” used realism to illustrate the same point; the characters sit in an apartment and wait for the phone call, which will decide Waverly’s fate. Through the facetious dialogue, the characters learn how to deal with the state of trauma. “Recent Tragic Events” poses the idea that people are cynical and dead inside, for example how the country reacted to the terrorist attacks. The character Ron claims that the media is a machine that cons people into thinking they’re surprised when a cataclysmic event, like 9/11, shakes a country.
“Recent Tragic Events” posed the difference between stage hands and actors. Before the play, the stage director allowed the audience to flip a coin in order to decide the outcome of the play. This led into the play’s motif of chance, metaphorical to catastrophic events in life that we do not account for. Later in the play, the stage director announced himself as a mere actor in the play. He went on to claim how the power in a play is in the hands of the playwright and that everyone else is a puppet in the production. This posed the question about free will and interconnectedness; is there such a thing?
Later in the play, a sock-puppet representation of Joyce Carol Oates asked the rest of the cast, “Are you a Christian? You think you’re a puppet, but humans are free to make choices.”
UT and Owens, as far apart as they are academically, both hold true in their theatric observations of the human condition, which is exactly the potential of a theatrical performance. Whether the production is community, professional or collegiate, theatre is capable of reminding us how human beings operate and why they do what they do. “Machinal” and “Recent Tragic Events” debate the idea of freedom and how we go about obtaining it, despite how obvious it may seem.
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