ABSTRACT
Sophie Treadwell (1885–1970) is widely recognized as one of the most significant women dramatists of the first half of the twentieth century. Her unconventional and trailblazing life intersected with many of that era's prominent historical and political movements and fueled the forms and subjects of her writings in theatre, fiction, and journalism. Her play Machinal (1928) has been anthologized several times and has been hailed as a landmark feminist exploration of gender and patriarchal power in modern America. While Treadwell's dramatic works employ a variety of forms and styles, a significantly large number of them adhere to the principles of the late nineteenth-century “well-made play” structure. Treadwell left very few written statements about dramatic theory, but her unpublished lecture, “Writing a Play,” stands as her most extensive statement about her writing process and search for a unique authorial voice. The lecture, one of three offered by Treadwell to students of Richard Boleslavsky's American Laboratory Theatre in 1925, reveals her dissatisfactions with the commercial theatre and provides glimpses into the reasons for her successes and self-acknowledged challenges as a dramatist.
