Writing for the Theatre Magazine, theatre critic Perriton Maxwell noted that Machinal by Sophie Treadwell “bears no likeness to the sordid facts of that cheap tragedy”. [I] Indeed, Treadwell’s play is more concerned with the idea of an everywoman victimized by patriarchal society and stifling modernity than the exact details of the life and sensational trial of Long Island housewife Ruth Snyder, who was executed via the electric chair in 1928. Snyder, along with her lover Henry Judd Grey, murdered her husband Albert in 1927. Like the protagonist of Machinal, Snyder was married to a much older man and they had a daughter with him. Snyder took out a $48,000 life insurance policy on her husband prior to his death. She and Grey rather sloppily murdered Albert by bludgeoning him with a window weight and stuffing his mouth with chloroform rags. They subsequently   tried to pass it off as a burglary gone wrong, but the police were suspicious and they were both arrested shortly thereafter. At trial, Snyder and Grey each accused the other of planning the crime. They were both convicted of murder and sentenced to death.[ii] Snyder was executed in Sing Sing Prison. A photograph of Snyder strapped to the electric chair was surreptitiously taken and widely published in the tabloids.[iii]