more than zero?
by Douglas Messerli
Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt
(libretto), based on the play by Elmer Rice, Joshua Schmidt (music) The Adding Machine, Minetta Lane
Theatre, New York, opened November 14, 2007 the performance I attended was the
matinee of May 11, 2008
My determination expressed in my
2002 essay on Billy Wilder’s The
Apartment that I would revisit Elmer Rice’s play The Adding Machine has stayed with me over the five years since,
and when I saw that a musical version of the 1923 expressionist play had opened
in New York in 2007, I seized the opportunity to attend on my May visit to the
city.
I was surprised, I must admit, by the dramatic and musical intensity of
this chamber-like piece. Indeed, I found it a much more fascinating work than
the blockbuster musical revivals, South
Pacific and Gypsy, I revisited
during the same trip. This work outshines the more predictable feel-good and
block-party celebration that won the Tony for the best musical of 2008, In the Heights, but the legendary
Minetta Lane Theatre is not on Broadway!
As I had remembered the play, it is certainly a devastating portrait of
the workplace; but unlike Wilder’s film, Rice’s play is not centered in the
office, but focuses on the entire life of its anti-hero, Mr. Zero, who is
abused and dismissed not as much by his boss—who after all does nothing more
than fire him on a day Mr. Zero thought he might get a raise—but by his wife
and friends, by the community outside his workplace.
Indeed, we discover in the next scene at the office that Zero himself is
the adding machine, a man who adds figures in his head, demanding that his
assistant, Daisy, speed up her call of the numbers of each and every sale.
When, after 25 years at the job, his boss asks to speak with him, Zero cannot
imagine anything but that his employer has had “his eye on him,” and intends to
reward his dedication.
In fact, the boss intends to replace Zero with a mechanical adding
machine. Unable to even fathom what he is being told, Zero is enveloped, in the
original play, with loud noises, a swelling of music, the sound of wind, waves,
the galloping of horses, a locomotive whistle, sleigh bells, an automobile
siren, the crash of a glass, a peal of thunder.
The third scene of the play, wherein all the other “numbers,” friends of
Zero and his wife, have gathered at his home for a party, is one of the best of
the play. With the men on one side of the room and the woman on the other, Rice
treats us to a delicious parody of the prejudicial attitudes of the working
class, and underlines the near impossibility of any individual act. The scene
ends with his arrest, as Zero admits the murder of his employer and meekly allows
the police to take him away.
In a sense, this is the only possible way that Zero could escape his
humdrum existence. In the original play, this fact is almost immediately
revealed, directly after a powerful courtroom scene, in a frightening and comic
graveyard. But under David Cromer's excellent direction, Zero encounters a
fellow murderer—a young man who, in carving up a turkey on Sunday afternoon,
applies the knife to the throat of his beloved mother instead—in his prison
cell; as the two are literally forced to carry their cells with them as they
move about, we recognize that even murder has allowed them little respite.
The gods of the universe Rice presents
seem at first more forgiving than human folk. Instead of a scene of fire and
brimstone that the young murderer Shrdlu has prepared for, both he and Zero
find themselves in the pleasant landscape of the Elysian Fields, where they are
permitted to experience all the pleasures previously disallowed. Daisy, the
young woman with whom Zero had worked, is also there, having committed suicide
upon her colleague’s arrest. Together they discover their unspoken love for each
other. But like Shrdlu, Zero is unprepared for the pleasures now facing him.
From his completely bourgeois perspective, he can only imagine that a world
which awards crimes such as his own is not one in which he can partake; he will
not live in a society of “drunkards, thieves, vagabonds, blasphemers,
adulterers,” a world filled with “a lot of rummies an’ loafers an’ bums.”
Damned to mediocrity, Zero “lives out”
the rest of his afterlife adding figures on a new adding machine given him by
the gods.
These “gods,” moreover, are evidently
no more forgiving than the earthbound society he has left, as it is ultimately
revealed that all souls are used over and over again, and that he is to be sent
back to the world which he has thought he escaped. For century after century he
has been returned to the living, becoming worse and worse as a vital human
being each time around.
The play closes accordingly, with the
reincarnated hero, a “poor, spineless, brainless boob,” once again facing his
brave new world. One can only pray that this time he may become more than a
zero—even if he rises only to become a simple number in the human race.
Both Wilder’s film and Rice’s play,
accordingly, end with the possibility of transcendence, but while we surely
believe that Baxter and Kubelik have escaped the world that formerly imprisoned
them, we are fearful that Zero will embrace the prison of his blind ignorance
once again.
New York City, May 12, 2008
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera,
and Performance (May 2008)
