Campus, Students

Breaking Free of the Machine

Puget Sound’s spring theater production explores the costs of conformity.

In March, the stage lights came up in Norton Clapp Theatre on a very different kind of production. A small group of actors wearing face shields stood in front of rows of empty seats while cameras streamed the performance online. After the COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the fall main stage show, Puget Sound’s Department of Theatre Arts found creative solutions to safely mount the spring production of Machinal.

Students sit in a dimly lit control room above the Norton Clapp Theatre stage, preparing for a dress rehearsal of Machinal in March 2021

A view from the control room, looking down onto the Norton Clapp Theatre stage while students prepare for a dress rehearsal of Machinal.

During the performance, director Jess K. Smith ’05 sat offstage and watched the livestream on a TV monitor. When she started planning out the show, she realized the safety requirements presented an opportunity to use technology and innovative production design to create an experience that might not have existed without the pandemic. Instead of building a traditional, outward-facing set, Smith and her crew of staff members and students constructed something more reminiscent of a TV soundstage—complete with three cameras capturing angles that wouldn’t normally be visible to a seated audience. The performance also featured on-screen graphics, including an animation of turning gears to symbolize the invisible machinery of society, actors digitally inserted into scenes, and prerecorded elements.

“This is the most technologically complex show I've ever worked on as a director,” Smith said. “We had to develop a production concept that made sense of hybrid performance, masks, and social distancing, while also trying to tell the story in an exciting way.”

Machinal was written in 1928 by Sophie Treadwell, but despite being almost a century old, the play continues to resonate with audiences as it explores themes of capitalism, the experience of being a woman in America, and the nature of freedom. The story follows a young woman through nine episodes in which the expectations of society suffocate her desire to make her own choices. As she fails to escape from the confines of work, marriage, and motherhood, she becomes increasingly desperate to exert agency over her own life. She rebels against what’s expected of her, engaging in an affair and, ultimately, murdering her neglectful husband. In the play’s final moments, as she’s about to go to the electric chair, she confesses that “[for] one moment I was free.”

Associate professor and director

Jess K. Smith ’05

“It’s a steep learning curve, but the goal of a well-rounded education is to reflect on what the moment is calling for and meet it well. That’s precisely what our students have done.”

Smith believes that the core issues raised in Machinal always will be timeless, especially for college students, who are often under a lot of pressure to conform to preconceived notions of happiness and personal success.

“There are always people who are made to feel like they do not belong and that they are interrupting the machine,” said Smith. “This show deals a lot with the weight of expectations. The young woman in this show experiences quite a bit of anxiety, which I think many of our students can relate to.”

Lauren VonEschen ’21 played the protagonist and instantly connected with her character’s predicament when she read the script. Despite the role’s physical and emotional demands, VonEschen was excited to return to live performance and embody a character whose isolation parallels her own experience of life in the midst of a global health crisis.

“The young woman is literally and physically trapped, and reading for the part reminded me of how we’ve all felt trapped this past year,” VonEschen said.

Puget Sound’s unique production of Machinal also allowed Smith to cast Alex Miller ’22 as part of the ensemble, despite the fact that Miller lives 1,000 miles away in Los Angeles.

“I was the only actor not in Tacoma. For the first week of rehearsals in the theater, they had me on Zoom on a TV screen, and it was a lot of hand gesturing and texting and FaceTiming to get on the same page,” Miller said. “But once we got our groove, it was so seamless; it almost felt like I was there.”

The production team went to great lengths to give the impression that Miller was onstage with the rest of the cast. Her parents even received credit in the playbill for their work in transforming a corner of Miller’s bedroom into an approximation of the set on campus. For a shot where the audience could see Miller’s feet, the crew sent her a sample of flooring to stand on to match the stage. In another scene, in which Miller has a conversation with Lilly Kelly ’23, Smith worked with both actors to position them in such a way that it looked like they were in the same space and making eye contact.

Thanks to a grant from the Matthew Norton Clapp Endowment for Guest Artists, Smith was able to hire professional video and sound designers Trevor Sargent and Robert Quillen Camp to create the immersive, virtual world of the play.

“I am truly so amazed with how the video and sound team worked to make this so transcendent. I don't know if it would have the same effect without the projections and sound effects—or without the isolating experience of watching at home on your laptop,” Miller said. “It's a play about the machine and you need a machine to access it. It’s all very meta and so applicable to this strange time.”

Sargent encouraged Smith and the rest of the crew to think of inventive ways to use the medium of video to do something that could never exist in a live performance. In one scene, the young woman meets a mysterious man in a dark, claustrophobic bar. When she decides to leave with him, the actors burst through the walls of the soundstage and the play cuts to a scene that was filmed at Owen Beach, located four miles north of campus within Tacoma’s Point Defiance Park. A bed sits in the water against an expansive background of sea and sky, symbolizing how the young woman has broken free of her constraints and taken the audience with her. The juxtaposition is one of Smith’s favorite moments in the play, as well as one of the most complicated to execute.

“The whole production has forced us to learn new skills, like how to act for camera and incorporate all these technical elements,” said Smith. “It’s a steep learning curve, but the goal of a well-rounded education is to reflect on what the moment is calling for and meet it well. That’s precisely what our students have done.”

Three performances of Machinal were streamed live to YouTube, where the play was seen by 900 people all over the world. When the curtain went down each night, the ensemble waited to hear Smith read aloud some of the comments they received during the show in lieu of applause. For VonEschen, hearing from audience members who enjoyed the show validated her performance and the power theater has to connect people, even if that connection happens through a computer screen.

“It just goes to show that audiences have a desire to engage with this medium,” VonEschen said. “Anyone who is wanting to create something and put it out into the world right now should do it because people are hungry for it.”

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