(October 3, 1885 - Feb. 20, 1970)
"La Amiga de Mexico"
She first was exposed to the theatre when she spent summers with her father in San Francisco. She was thrilled with Helena Modjeska's performance in The Merchant of Venice and Sarah Bernhardt's Phedre. The breakup of her parents' marriage affected her deeply. Her paternal grandmother and great-grandmother were Mexican women of Spanish descent. Her maternal grandmother, Anna Gray Fairchild, a Scottish immigrant, was a strong role model.
Her earliest plays were written for campus productions at the University of California (1902-1906) including A Man's Own, a one-act stressing equality for women. She graduated in the spring at the time of the San Francisco earthquake with a Bachelor of Letters degree. She had also trained herself in journalism and wrote feature articles for the San Francisco Chronicle. She gained acting experience in vaudeville and stock. By sheer coincidence she was introduced to her idol, Madame Modjeska and lived for some time at Modjeska's ranch studying acting and assisting her with her memoirs. She covered crime news and reviewed plays for the San Francisco Bulletin and between 1910 and 1920 she reported on boxing matches, murders and wars. A strong feminist and member of the Lucy Stone League of suffragettes, she participated in a 150-mile march with the League, which delivered a petition on women's suffrage to the legislature of New York. She was an advocate for sexual independence, birth control rights, and increased sexual freedom for women. She also lectured and advocated authors' rights and was the first American playwright to win royalty payments for a play production from the Soviet Union.
She retained her maiden name after her marriage to sports writer William O'Connell McGeehan. She regularly reported events of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) for American newspapers. She was the first American woman war correspondent and wrote about the rule, overthrow, flight, and murder of Carranza. She was the only reporter to get an interview with Pancho Villa in Mexico--an international scoop.
In 1915 Sympathy, her first play to be produced, opened at the Pantages Theatre in San Francisco. During World War 1 she was in France covering the battles. Returning home in 1918 she and her husband settled in New York City where she wrote Madame Bluff from her war experiences. Gringo, produced in 1922, opened at the Comedy Theatre in New York, directed by Guthrie McClintic. She also began writing a biographical play about Edgar Allan Poe (Plumes in the Dust). Due to litigation from John Barrymore's wife, Michael Strange who wrote Dark Crown about Poe for her husband, a suit and countersuit, ultimately it was produced in 1936 starring Henry Hull.
MACHINAL
This expressionist tragedy in nine episodes was "one of the most unusual plays of the twenties" according to John Gassner. In describing the dramatic goals of Machinal she said, "It is all in the title-Machine-al-machine-like. A young woman--ready---eager--for life---for love...but deadened---squeezed---crushed by the machine-like quality of the life surrounding. She is a woman who must love and be loved.And she goes through life trying to justify this. She reaches out to her mother---to a man to marry---to having a child---a lover---searching for that living 'somebody'. She cannot reach to God, and she dies with this call---'somebody.' She finds her answer once---in the lover. And in this scene comes her blossoming---she is complete...like a flower." (Treadwell Papers)
Produced September 7, 1928, directed by Arthur Hopkins with Robert Edmond Jones as
scene designer, the play was a critical and commercial success. Zita Johann starred as the Young Woman, George Still as the Husband and the role of the lover was performed so well by Clark Gable
that it impressed the Hollywood producers.
In 1931 foreign productions took Treadwell to London, Paris and Moscow.
She was the first United States playwright known to have earned royalties in rubles that she was obliged to spend in the U.S.S.R.
In future plays (not all equally successful, nor all produced) she would tackle the themes of adultery in a seriocomic, psychoanalytical manner (Ladies Leave); a prostitute who seeks a new life but fails to find it (Lone Valley); a slice-of-life drama depicting post-Revolutionary lives in Russia, including that of a Communist party official (Promised Land); corruption in boxing (Million-Dollar Gate). Hope for a Harvest was produced by the Theatre Guild and starred Florence Eldridge and Frederic March. They performed it on a road tour and while it didn't get the "money" reviews in New York it was selected for inclusion in The Best Plays of 1941-42. The interesting aspects of the play are the social comments she is making about a society which is overly materialistic. She used the metaphor of a decaying ranch as a symbol for an America in decline; an immigrant country which wanted to shut its doors to immigrants, a society abusing the resources inherited from immigrant ancestors. One of the characters says: "There's something awful wrong, Lot---about what people like us have let happen to our land. Two hundred million of it just plain used up since we took it over from the Indians. You see, the Indians respected the land--they knew there are gods in it. We ain't got gods anymore. Just a lot of machines."It was successfully produced on television by the United States Steel Hour in 1951.
Sophie's childhood picture shows that she was serious and her eyes reveal a maturity beyond her age. She became the first American woman playwright to write the international political play, the experimental (surrealistic) play, the play with a sexually liberated woman, and the play with a non-heroic male protagonist. Unquestionably she was an agent for change in the content and the structure of American drama in the first half of the 20th century!
Resources: Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989 Louise Heck-Rabi
Shafer, Yvonne. American Women Playwrights 1900-1950.
Twenty-Five Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre: Early Series, ed. John Gassner (1949)
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