Not Enough Air

Few props are more dispiriting than the typewriter. The number of compelling plays about writers might be counted on one hand, and that hand belongs mostly to Tom Stoppard. Playwright Obolensky labors mightily to convey the necessity that drove Sophie Treadwell (Brooks) to transform the Ruth Snyder murder trial into her classic Machinal. And yet the effort seems entirely superfluous: The taut, eccentric language in the snippet of Treadwell’s play we get at the end of Not Enough Air speaks far more eloquently about the pressure its creator felt. The contrast with Obolensky’s dutifully expressionist pastiche is keen.

Not Enough Air contains several promising ideas for a play: the simultaneously sympathetic and exploitive relationship between Treadwell and Snyder, the frenzy of a writer literally haunted by her subject, the tender and complex marriage of Treadwell to sportswriter William McGeehan (Parkes). But all remain submerged within a haze of voices barking into telephones and furniture moving about; at times the piece feels like an evening at a Walter E. Smithe showroom.

TimeLine gives Not Enough Air a characteristically snappy production, featuring a restrained but versatile Brian Sidney Bembridge design and fine sound work by Andrew Hansen. As Sophie, Brooks’s job is primarily to be indomitable, and she puts on her best Winged Victory. Only in her scenes with Parkes does her talent for nuance become apparent. The ever-uncanny Moe steals a good bit of the second act as Machinal’s Young Woman, demanding more life from her creator. For all the verve of Bowling’s direction, though, the performers remain stuck in a play more term paper than realized drama.