There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
that lift and drop a question on your plate
— From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T.S. Eliot, 1917

Sophie Treadwell (Anne Gottlieb) and Mac (Craig Mathers) in Not Enough Air (Photo credit: Elizabeth Stewart)

Not Enough Air by Masha Obolensky. Directed by Melia Bensussen. Set designed by Eric Levenson. Staged by the Nora Theatre Company at the Central Square Theater, Cambridge, MA, through March 14.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Unsurprisingly, Not Enough Air teems with interrogatives, many of its scenes punctuated with performers proffering staccato Whos, Hows, and Whys. Masha Obolensky’s compelling play explores the evolution of Machinal, the celebrated 1928 expressionist drama by journalist/playwright Sophie Treadwell, which was inspired by questions raised by the notorious Ruth Snyder/Judd Gray murder trial—why did this woman kill? And why the pitiless and sensational media stalking of Snyder, the first woman sentenced to death by electrocution?

Obolensky’s script takes the questions back a few notches: what was the creative and personal challenge for a woman of that day trying to write, with empathy and imagination, about a woman who snapped? What happens when the oxygen of rationality thins in the pursuit of the truth? The response is a rare dramatic specimen—the story of a woman artist heroically grappling with social pressures, inner doubts, health issues, and patriarchal strong-arming to give birth to a feminist answer to an essential question.

Sophie Treadwell (Anne Gottlieb) takes a call. (Photo credit: Elizabeth Stewart)

Before the journey through Treadwell’s unconscious, Obolensky supplies the background to Snyder’s life and trial via short scenes featuring an expressionist parade of characters, from Snyder herself (affectingly played by Ruby Rose Fox as a hard-boiled lost soul) to Treadwell’s fellow reporters, cynical radio announcers, tough police detectives, and her sympathetic spouse Mac. The approach is archly cinematic—the scenes skitter along in a jumpy manner meant to reflect the mounting pressure on the exasperated Treadwell, who covers the trial on her own because her newspaper has sent an opportunistic male colleague in her stead.

Instead of prurient curiosity, Treadwell feels sympathy for Snyder, a secret kinship. The empathy doesn’t only spring from her feeling, despite the pat arguments of others, that Snyder is not getting a fair trial. Both women suffer from neurasthenia, a serious nervous condition (crippling lassitude, anxiety, fatigue) that, as explored in plays such as Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed, takes female desperation to the point of parody and hallucination—it is the total embrace of dependence in a society that denies women the freedom to live and create.

Thus the urge to rebel, not to “submit,” springs from bottled up anger and frustration, a striking back that takes the nihilistic form of murder in the case of Synder and a constructive grappling with the enemies of female dissent, internal and external, in the case of Treadwell. Like Machinal, Obelensky’s play turns on the modernist metaphor of creation as a form of murder, an order that takes place after destruction.

As dreamed up by Obolensky, Treadwell’s spur to create is an anarchistic demon—a fusion of Treadwell and Snyder, a devilish dynamo necessary to fuel her art. The spirit commands Treadwell to write the play to the point of exhaustion, to embrace isolation, a turn from rationality and domesticity that puts strains on her healthy relationship with her spouse, Mac. Thankfully, Mac is not treated by Obolensky as the stereotypical male enemy, but as a sympathetic lover who may be limited in his understanding of his mate but respectful of her need to create.

The interaction between the demon and Treadwell supplies some of the most memorable scenes in the play (I love the sprite’s primal scream) though inevitably attempts to dramatize the creative process fall short. For me, less historical background and more elaboration on Treadwell’s internal duels, her conflicts with the husband, would have been welcome, but what the dramatist supplies is provocative.

The movie rhythms of the play are apt, given that the famous photo of Snyder’s execution, taken surreptitiously by a Chicago photographer and published on the front page of the New York Daily News, was an important step in the tabloidization of the media. The controversial photo skyrocketed the paper’s circulation, accelerating our embrace of the visual over the textual that continues, with pernicious efficiency, to this day. Ironically, the hysteria whipped up by the Snyder trail contributed to the popular success of Machinal.

James Cagney as the rascally Picture Snatcher

(Those interested in the mass culture sentiments of the period should check out “Picture Snatcher” a 1933 Jimmy Cagney film that Turner Classic Movies shows from time to time. Cagney plays an ambitious photographer based on the guy who snapped the Snyder photo. In the movie the ploy to get the “money” shot is treated as a high stakes adventure, with the police chasing Cagney through the streets of the city, guns drawn, to confiscate the negative and stop the publication of the picture. The curio is the popularist reverse negative of Not Enough Air.)

In an illuminating interview given during the Chicago premiere of the play, Obolensky says that she “tried to create a pressurized environment—one that, like in Machinal, is driven by men, the men are the machine.” The Nora Theatre Company production could use some of the grinding snap, crackle, and pop of the Warner Brothers treatment, the sprightly ra-ta-tat-tat of the old Hollywood newsreels. When Anne Gottlieb, as Treadwell, is not on stage, the action feels a bit slack, the male machine gone soft, cartoonish.

But director Melia Benussen wields a sure hand with her talented leads: Gottlieb supplies an engagingly strong-willed Treadwell, a woman who unites intelligence and compassion. The actress expertly conveys panic at the mounting demands of her imagination—a genuine fear of being sucked under. Marianna Bassham’s sprite of the unconscious gives off frightening vibes, and Craig Mathers, as Mac, pulls off the neat trick of defending sanity without descending into whining or self-righteousness. Not Enough Air draws an impressive portrait of the woman artist as psychological warrior.