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Published on 7/4/08
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Reading Elmer Rice’s dazzling expressionistic play from 1923, The Adding Machine, one can imagine how its stylistic daring could easily lend itself to an equally eccentric musical. Then one shelves the thought, certain no one would have the cheek or heart to pull it off. Schmidt has pulled it off, and Cromer has intelligently staged it.
Variously atonal, chantlike, operatic, vaudevillian and spiritual, this surreal chamber musical stylistically captures the tonally eclectic tale of Mr. Zero (Hatch), an industrial-America cog. After Mrs. Zero’s (Baer) enthralling opening-scene rant, we find Zero at work. When his assistant, Miss Devore (Warren), reads the numbers that Zero adds, her routine recitation almost imperceptibly flows into song. It’s an exquisite moment of theater.
Cromer has marshaled a top-notch cast (you can’t not watch Warren), while designers Keith Parham (lights) and Matthew J. York (set) supply stunning work: smoky, sickly pale spots amid dystopic spaces. A precise calculus informs Cromer’s staging; after Zero flips and offs his boss, the dance between a prison-encased Zero and his wife mesmerizes. As is, the stylistic emphasis overtakes Rice’s theme, but that theme hits, even so. It’s not just work that’s industrialized, Rice argues; it’s a mentality. After an afterlife shot at happiness, Zero bolts and instead keeps pointlessly adding. It’s the same slave mentality of his friends, who robotically sing racial slurs one moment and “my country, ’tis of thee” the next: a mind-set that adds but never accrues. As it lingers in the mind, this odd, beautiful Machine goes on accruing.—Novid Parsi
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