A Play About Machines in the Workplace Still Adds Up a Century Later

The Adding Machine,” Elmer Rice’s classic expressionist study of a man’s dark fate after he’s made redundant at work by new technology, was first, and last, produced on Broadway back in 1923, more than 30 years before the term artificial intelligence was coined. Many more decades would pass before A.I. would emerge, at least for its critics, as an existential threat to humanity.But “Adding Machine” casts a much wider net in its study of dehumanization, one in which people themselves are held accountable. Rice, who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for “Street Scene,” a look at life in a New York tenement, was, like other writers of his generation, as concerned about the destructive impact of capitalism in their industrial era as some modern playwrights — Jordan Harrison, the author of “Marjorie Prime” and “The Antiquities,” comes foremost to mind — are of developments in our digital age.The central figure in “Adding Machine,” named Mr. Zero, is not a titan of industry but, as his name suggests, a nebbish who seems driven, to the extent he’s motivated at all, by impulse. His reaction to being fired after 25 years of loyal, dreary service is to kill his boss, a crime for which he is promptly tried and executed. Then after landing, against all odds, in a heaven-like afterworld, our protagonist spites himself again, following orders that assign him to repeat some variation on his whole sorry trajectory.For The New Group’s new off-Broadway production, helmed by its artistic director, Scott Elliott, Thomas Bradshaw has made some revisions to the text without altering the play’s spirit or its setting. Audience members enter to find an old-school adding machine at center stage, clicking away; Derek McLane’s scenic design and Catherine Zuber’s costumes evoke the play’s era with a sense of whimsy that can seem both ironic and appropriate, given the often arch tone of the writing.The most distinctly contemporary feature of this staging is that Mr. Zero is played by a woman: Daphne Rubin-Vega, who rose to fame in the original production of “Rent” and has since worked steadily in theater and film. Petite and almost pixie-like in some previous roles, Ms. Rubin-Vega plays the character as a wanna-be tough guy, lowering her piquant voice and moving gruffly about.Jennifer Tilly is cast as Mrs. Zero, who, after a prologue, opens the show with a lengthy monologue whining about her plight as dutiful housewife to a man who ignores her. It’s impossible to watch Ms. Tilly sulk or listen to her hoarse, breathy ranting without thinking of the mobster’s girlfriend she played back in the 1990s in Woody Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway,” her most famous film role, but the actress, to her credit, eventually makes this matron amusing and pathetic on her own terms.Sarita Choudhury gets to show more range as one Daisy Diana Dorothea Devore, identified by her first name, or as Miss Devore. Introduced as a colleague with whom Mr. Zero has a rather contentious relationship, she emerges as the woman he has secretly pined for. Ms. Choudhury’s earthy, effortless sexiness is almost comically repressed at first, which only makes its inevitable blossoming more pronounced — and sadder, once it becomes clear that their passion is mutual but nonetheless futile.Michael Cyril Creighton, whose comedic skills are known to fans of “Only Murders in the Building,” completes the ensemble in a number of roles, including the narrator and Lieutenant Charles, who oversees Mr. Zero’s progress, or lack of it, at the end of the play. Having opted to consign his soul to the same drudgery he endured in life, rather than embark on more promising but less familiar pursuits, Mr. Zero is initially upset when Charles informs him of another necessary transition; true to form, however, he ends up doing as he is told.“Time’s up,” Charles explains, after delivering a sermon on the devolution of Mr. Zero’s species over time. “Back you go—a slave to a contraption of iron and steel—the ready prey of the first jingo or demagogue or political adventurer who takes the trouble to play upon your ignorance and credulity and provincialism.” The admonishment is more politically pointed than the one in Rice’s original text, in which Charles compared humans to less sophisticated animals, as he also does in the new script, unfavorably. But the message is pretty much the same. More than 100 years after “The Adding Machine” made its premiere, it has lost none of its sting.

A Play About Machines in the Workplace Still Adds Up a Century Later

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