"Machinal" Examines a Wife Driven to Kill Machinal Rebecca Hall and Morgan Spector in the Roundabout Theater revival of Sophie Treadwell's play. A desperate life blazes amid devouring shadows in the Roundabout Theater Company's intensely stylish revival of "Machinal," Sophie Treadwell's fascinating play from 1928 about one woman's captivity in a hell called New York City. That life is embodied by the charismatic British stage and film star Rebecca Hall, in her Broadway debut, so you can bet that it's going to burn bright. I'll admit I was dubious when I learned Ms. Hall was playing the tragically crushable Young Woman in "Machinal," which has been staged by another powerhouse Briton new to Broadway, Lyndsey Turner. In take-charge parts like Vivie in "Mrs. Warren's Profession" (her London debut) and Rosalind in "As You Like It," Ms. Hall had such a vibrantly blooming stage presence that the idea of her as a passive natural-born victim sounded absurd. Yet in "Machinal," which opened on Thursday night at the American Airlines Theater in its first Broadway revival, Ms. Hall must struggle to hold her own against an overbearing co-star. That would be Es Devlin's revolving, scene-stealing set, which portrays a juggernaut of doom - i.e., modern urban existence - that flattens all in its path. Rebecca Hall and Edward James Hyland in "Machinal." You might say such a battle, pitting a lone specimen of humanity against a marvel of technology and artifice, only underscores the haunting determinism of "Machinal," and I wouldn't argue. And even if the Young Woman is clearly headed for extinction from the first scene, Ms. Hall's emotionally transparent performance is never overwhelmed by what surrounds it. So the contest between star and scenery ends in a draw. It's most of the supporting cast who are the casualties here, in ways that I think dilute the hypnotic cadences and potential impact of Treadwell's drama. Treadwell (1885-1970) was a prolific and successful playwright and journalist. But "Machinal" is the one work for which she's known today, and it's a rare and disturbing beauty. I was introduced to it by a revelatory 1990 production at the Public Theater, directed by a young Michael Greif. Its plot was inspired by the story of Ruth Snyder, a Long Island housewife who murdered her husband and died in the electric chair at Sing Sing. Yet there's nothing tabloid about the play's style. On the contrary, "Machinal" is a jagged symphony of voices, in which speech itself sounds as if it had come off a mass-production assembly line, spoken by people disconnected from their own words. As a portrait of a misfit protagonist in a regimented universe, "Machinal" echoes Expressionist works like Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape" (1922) and Elmer Rice's "The Adding Machine" (1923). What sets Treadwell's play apart is the gender of its central character, who is conceived with the kind of tender, probing empathy you associate with the interiority of modernist fiction. For the record, Ms. Hall hasn't found an entirely persuasive delivery for the play's stream-of-consciousness monologues. The Young Woman, whose appropriately generic name is Helen Jones, faces an even greater tyranny of rules and limitations than O'Neill's and Rice's hapless men. Living in the city with her harridan of a mother (Suzanne Bertish), and working as an untalented stenographer, she marries her small-minded, smothering boss (a miscast Michael Cumpsty). After all, what are her choices? All the while she longs for an abstract and impossible freedom. When she falls into bed with a romantically rough-hewed man (a fine Morgan Spector, in a part originated by Clark Gable), she believes that liberty awaits her, if she can only unshackle herself. The sense of the Young Woman's imprisonment, which begins long before her arrest in her husband's murder, is given harrowing and exquisite life by Ms. Devlin and a design team that also includes Jane Cox (lighting), Michael Krass (costumes) and Matt Tierney (sound). The first scene is a stunner. It portrays a moving subway car, eerily transected by bars of light and crammed with interchangeable bodies in shades of gray. In their midst, Ms. Hall's wan but luminous face registers like an out-of-season crocus in an ash heap. Her wide-open features signal pain and panic, which will prove to be her habitual expression. There is no chance this exotic, bruisable flower will endure. That first vision establishes the counterpoint that runs throughout all that follows. Ms. Devlin's revolving set (she used the same idea for Ms. Turner's hit production of Lucy Kirkwood's "Chimerica" in London) turns as inexorably as the earth to reveal our heroine amid a series of inhospitable vistas, from the office to the bedroom. Every design detail - like the immense, sickly colored curtains that cover windows - seems to confirm and mock her feelings of confinement. The same forbidding quality should also be evident in how the other characters talk and move, and it's here that this "Machinal" falls short. Treadwell wrote dialogue in which clichés hammer, relentlessly and insensibly, at her heroine. Of the large cast, only the estimable Mr. Cumpsty appears to grasp fully this concept, with harshly rhythmic line readings that match the production's mechanistic look. Try as he might to conceal it, though, Mr. Cumpsty is a fit and attractive man, while his character (whose "fat hands" are mentioned in disgust) is meant to be so repulsive that the heroine's "skin curls" at his very touch. Allowing for the age difference, he's not all that different from the handsome soldier of fortune with whom the Young Woman falls in love. Mr. Spector is just right in the scenes he shares with Ms. Hall, and his low-key spontaneity makes sense. In his arms, life for her briefly seems real instead of a nightmare. But for these enchanted glimpses to exert their full force, we need more rigorously stylized and synchronized performances elsewhere. The ensemble acting is so diffuse and varied that scenes that should be achingly suspenseful, like the climactic trial, often sag. That slackness has the unfortunate side effect of making Ms. Hall's character seem less a sensitive victim of a brute society than of her own mental illness. As a consequence, "Machinal" feels more like a diary of a mad housewife (or even Roman Polanski's creepy film classic "Repulsion") than is entirely suitable. Still, it's a thrill to have as illuminating a guide as Ms. Hall to take us through the twisting corridors of derangement.