Treadwell bases her Machinal off the real story behind the Snyder-Gray murder trial in 1927. In a modern New York Times article, Steven Heighton describes the murderous duo:
“Gray was a dutiful, earnest little man who taught Sunday school and sang in his local Elks lodge choir, but he also belonged to the Club of Corset Salesmen of the Empire State and away from home was a stylish, likably urbane seller of lingerie, with an acute thirst for bootleg whiskey. Snyder was a devoted mother and daughter who took pride in putting up fruit every fall. She was also a flapperish coquette who, encased in a marriage to an emotionally remote older man, took Gray as a lover and conspired with him in a sloppy murder plot, after insuring her husband’s life with a sizable policy that offered ‘double indemnity’ in case of accidental death. Damon Runyon called the killing, which the flighty Snyder and the Scotch-addled Judd tried to mock up as a burglary gone awry, ‘The Dumbbell Murder.’”
Snyder and Gray killed her husband on March 20, 1927, and soon after both were convicted of the crime in the Queens County Courthouse. In January, 1928—not even a full year after the murder—the lovers were executed, and Ruth Snyder would go down in history as the first woman to be executed by the electric chair in New York. All of New York was engrossed in the story, and Sophie Treadwell was one of the many journalists who attended the proceedings. Working at lightning speed, she created a fictional story to mirror that of Snyder and named it Machinal. Much of the play’s success is owed to how swiftly Treadwell produced the script; Machinal premiered on Broadway just eight months after Ruth Snyder was executed.
The Norton Anthology of Drama
“Gray was a dutiful, earnest little man who taught Sunday school and sang in his local Elks lodge choir, but he also belonged to the Club of Corset Salesmen of the Empire State and away from home was a stylish, likably urbane seller of lingerie, with an acute thirst for bootleg whiskey. Snyder was a devoted mother and daughter who took pride in putting up fruit every fall. She was also a flapperish coquette who, encased in a marriage to an emotionally remote older man, took Gray as a lover and conspired with him in a sloppy murder plot, after insuring her husband’s life with a sizable policy that offered ‘double indemnity’ in case of accidental death. Damon Runyon called the killing, which the flighty Snyder and the Scotch-addled Judd tried to mock up as a burglary gone awry, ‘The Dumbbell Murder.’”
Snyder and Gray killed her husband on March 20, 1927, and soon after both were convicted of the crime in the Queens County Courthouse. In January, 1928—not even a full year after the murder—the lovers were executed, and Ruth Snyder would go down in history as the first woman to be executed by the electric chair in New York. All of New York was engrossed in the story, and Sophie Treadwell was one of the many journalists who attended the proceedings. Working at lightning speed, she created a fictional story to mirror that of Snyder and named it Machinal. Much of the play’s success is owed to how swiftly Treadwell produced the script; Machinal premiered on Broadway just eight months after Ruth Snyder was executed.
The Norton Anthology of Drama