The Adding Machine
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Crawford, Ruppe
Photo by JT MacMillan
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By January Riddle
Once in a blue moon there comes a play so provocative that you find yourself discussing it as soon as curtain call ends. You talk about it on the way to your car and linger too long in the parking lot, making points, sharing observations, and recalling pithy moments.
Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, at La Jolla Playhouse’s Potiker Theatre, is such a play, not only because of its all-too-relevant expressionist script but also because of its inventive staging and expert interpretation. This is a play about change and its inevitable effects, about loveless, humorless, robotic existence, and the inability of all but the most enlightened to embrace life’s wonders.
At the most basic level, you cannot help but see similarities between Henry Ford’s inauguration of the revolutionary assembly line in the 1920s and today’s terpsichore of technological revolutions. Thanks to Daniel Aukin’s scrupulous direction, you and your theatre companions could easily play a game of Trivia with the staging hints and acting bits of business that make entertaining and thought-provoking what could have been a depressingly mundane look at a worker’s world gone instantly haywire.
As you lean against your car bumper, you could point out the idiosyncratic electric pencil sharpener, metal TV dinner trays, garish pink chandeliers. None of that would belong in a 1930s office or home, but their discoveries deliver intentional little jolts of incongruity throughout the performance. Your companion could observe that the Potiker’s black box was an ideal venue for such a darkly comedic work, especially with Andrew Lieberman’s turntable set that offered not only the logistical benefit of audience engagement but also a symbolic statement of never-ending cycles. And you may smile in recalling Maiko Matsushima’s alternately suitable and silly costumes, including the Boss’ prize fighter outfit, and Sound Designer Colbert S. Davis IV outrageously exaggerated effects at tense moments.
The play’s tension begins with Mrs. Zero’s opening monologue, a litany of her perceived emotional and financial abuse at the hands of her silent lump of a husband. Maddeningly delivered by Jan Leslie Harding, the words and the whine make you want to scream, and you wonder how her husband keeps from murdering her. But as soon as Mr. Zero rises from his Strata-lounger, you understand that he doesn’t care enough about his marriage to spend passion on it. But getting fired from his bookkeeping job and replaced by an adding machine, that brings him to homicide. In lesser hands, Mr. Zero would be sick and dreary. But Richard Crawford draws on his experience in clown work to intimately and sympathetically portray this Sad Sack.
Mr. Zero is like a man who has misinterpreted the Serenity Prayer. He believes only in its first line, the one about acceptance of things one cannot change, forgetting that the second line, the one about courage to change the possible, is what holds promise and hope. Even eternal opportunity for love and leisure in Elysian Fields eludes him, for his fear of something different overwhelms any action he may have taken for something better.
Zero is not alone in his complacent misery. Mr. and Mrs. One, Two, and Three find no joy in their Mudvilles, either, finding only forced party fun in sniping at each other. Daisy, the lover that Zero might have had in life and fleetingly finds after death, cannot convince him to ignore his dogmatic world view and stay in paradise with her. Diana Ruppe’s Daisy is alternately snarky and captivating, and Ruppe skillfully dances along the thin wire that separates kitsch from conviction.
The prophet in this play comes in the role of Shrdlu, darkly and mesmerizingly portrayed by Joshua Everett Johnson. It is he who declares that “only the most privileged remain” in Elysian Fields, although everyone is welcome to stay. A mother-murderer, Shrdlu knows the destinies of everyone but himself. He longs for the eternal hellfire and damnation that he thinks he deserves. Instead, he is hopelessly doomed to wander in search of a punishment that would justify his former existence.
A worse fate awaits Mr. Zero, who learns, lifetimes too late, that his sorry lot has been cast by eons of his ennui. Hope did not spring eternal in Elmer Rice’s world. And, as you climb into your car at the end of your enlightened evening, you can’t help but wonder if the playwright’s insights ring far too shrilly for comfort in the changing world of today.
The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice runs at La Jolla Playhouse’s Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre through Sunday, Oct. 7. Performances are at 7:30 pm Weds/Thurs; 8 pm Fri/Sat; 7 pm Sun. Matinees at 2 pm Sat & Sun.
Tickets are $28-$60, with discounts for seniors, students and military.
Reservations by phone at 1-858-550-1010 or online at www.lajollaplayhouse.org
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