Gender Conventions and Expectations
George wants to marry Helen. George makes Helen’s skin crawl when she thinks about him touching her. Helen marries George, has a baby she doesn’t want and a one-night stand which leads to her murdering George. Helen is not a happy camper because she has an independent streak within her that is completely at odds with expectations for women. George, on the other hand, grows up embracing the expectations of men and pursue a wife, children, vacations and wealth with abandon. The same rules of physics applies to expectations of both men and women, but the rules of the game do not. Both George and Helen submit to the same forces of societal conventions and both give in to that equity of pressure, but one winds up murdered and the other executed so even though George was happy to submit and Helen was not, the question at the end becomes what purpose do those forces of pressure to conform serve?
Man and Machine
The title of the play translates into English as mechanical or automatic or involuntary, suggesting a not so much an android machine-man as man behaving with mechanical unthinking as if stripped of their humanity rather than transformed. This theme is pursued in several ways in the play, aside from the title. With the ironic exception of George H. Jones, the characters are not given names at all or the name is not immediately revealed upon introduction. For instance, Helen’s name is only revealed halfway through and she is listed in the script as Young Woman most of the time, but simply Woman in one scene. Likewise, the minor characters are known simply by occupation such as Stenographer, Doctor, Court Report, Priest. In addition to being reduced to a mechanistic name, much of the dialogue—especially that of the minor characters—is machine-like repetition filled with trite and mundane words and ideas.
Communication, Isolation and Alienation
The narrative pursues an irrational logic in which the attempt to communicate with others actually has the ironic consequence of deepening the sense of isolation and alienation from them. Helen struggles to explain to her mother just how profoundly repugnant the idea of marrying George—or anyone else—is to her only to wind up deciding to marry him after having changed her not to. The night of the honeymoon is like watching a film with the dialogue out of sync except it is the character of the new husband and bride that is out of sync. This ability of communicative discourse between people serving to alienate them is most spectacularly put on display in the speakeasy scene of Episode Five in which three different conversations are taking place at three different tables at once, independent of one another despite the close proximity of the tables to each other.
