An Old Play Speaks to Contemporary Realities
Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, produced by the New Century Theatre Co., opens at ACT Theatre tonight and runs Thurs.–Sun. through December 13. Tickets $25, available online here.
"Everything old is new again" goes the old maxim, and never has this been truer than in the case of Elmer Rice's 1923 play The Adding Machine. Rice's script is a near-forgotten masterpiece of early-20th century American theatre: a long (at seven acts), brutal play exploring racism, anomie, and alienation in the character of Mr. Zero, a dull accountant who, after years of dedication to a soul-crushing job, finds himself about to be downsized, replaced by an adding machine, and responds in a murderous rage.
Variously credited with bringing theatrical Expressionism to the American stage and derided as didactic agit-prop, the play's reputation has been re-born in recent years, particularly following the well received musical version that opened at the Next Theater in Illinois in 2007 and wowed audiences in New York earlier this year. The production that opens at ACT Theatre tonight, by Seattle-based New Century Theatre Company, isn't the musical version, but NCT—founded by eight Seattle theatre professionals to "reinvigorate" Seattle's theatre scene (more power to them!)—looks to deliver a winning performance of Rice's original that feels strangely timely.
On the face of it, The Adding Machine should be nothing more than a museum piece today. Even the titular machine has long since been rendered irrelevant, much as it did Mr. Zero, by computer technology. And what's more, the play's politics feel positively pre-Cold War. This is a play, after all, about a soul-dead man, living his life like an automaton in an increasingly mechanistic society, who undergoes an existential crisis when confronted with his irrelevance to the economic system that he's served, and then responds by murdering his boss. You just don't see this sort of thing today: Even when the story is similar, we're obsessed by the psychology, rather the politics or economics, of it. We have different names, different ways of thinking about (and rationalizing) the dehumanizing nature of the world we live in.
Where Rice could place the blame on the social structure of Modernity, today, we've replaced Modern anomie and alienation with post-modern ennui. Whereas Zero was pushed to humanizing violence and passion, we respond to the same impulses with a variety of stimulus-inducing or -suppressing drugs. Anti-depressants when you feel bad, Viagra when you want to feel good. Stress? Watch television and then buy stuff. Feeling worthless, lonely, unattractive (since all you do is sit around all day and eat crap)? Well, we've got copious amounts of Internet porn!
Photo: Paul Morgan Stetler as Mr. Zero in New Century Theatre Company's production of The Adding Machine. By Chris Bennion
So part of the play's appeal may lie precisely in this retro modality, out of fashion today, that our fears and anxieties are not a personal issue but rather a product of the world we live in and which can therefore be confronted. Wasn't it Marx himself who wrote that "all that is solid melts into air"? But we'd venture to guess that the play's appeal to today's audiences and producers owes even more to the fact that it's always addressed the uncomfortable divide between the big winners and losers in a time of prosperity. A work of populist rage against the machinations of capitalism, it was written not in the Thirties, when that system was in crisis, but in the early Twenties, just as America was beginning the big boom after the First World War that was massively extending prosperity to a burgeoning middle class.
That's right, people used to question—deeply and passionately—the prevailing winds. Compare this to what we get today, like the last play we saw at ACT, Becky's New Car. In this brand-new play, legitimate fears about economic stability in a working class family are written off as the comic neuroses of a middle-class woman. The up-side of a woman doing porn is laconically mentioned. There's actually a character on-stage to psychoanalyze all the main character's actions. And the end? After being drawn into an affair at least as much by the promise of living a life of leisure and wealth as by erotic passion, Becky resigns herself to a life with her old, boring husband, and proposes that there's this great, inherent beauty and dignity by accepting our lots. This, by the way, is the reconciliation of a roofer and a woman who works at an American auto dealership, both of whom would be unemployed or on the verge of it right now if they were real.
There's a contrast for you: a brand new play that already feels outdated and a 85-year-old one that feels perfectly contemporary. One encourages us to look on the bright side, to accept what we can't change (which is apparently our socio-economic status) and just have a good time, while the other encourages us to wake up, see the world for the screw-job it is, and—gasp!—maybe get a little pissed about that.
So yes, we're a little excited to see this show. This is theatre doing what it should be, playing the role of dissident and discontent all at once, and showing us a bit of the ugliness in the world.
