In Elmer Rice's pessimistic 1923 black comedy "The Adding Machine," the hapless and self-defeating Mister Zero trudges miserably through life and death with the stubborn determination of a worker bee drone. Although Zero's odyssey is darkly comic, there's no escape for him (or the audience) from the relentless oppression that dogs him from one world to the next.
In the roaring '20s, Rice's expressionistic play was a topical wake-up call about the dehumanizing effects of an increasingly mechanized world. And in Daniel Aukin's eye-popping new production at La Jolla Playhouse, the cruel, isolating universe that Rice envisioned is fully and creatively realized. But opportunities to make the 84-year-old play relevant to modern audiences are sometimes missed in the well-designed and -cast show.
In "The Adding Machine," Mister Zero is a disgruntled department store bookkeeper who is replaced by an adding machine on his 25th anniversary with the company. Already saddled with a constantly nagging wife and a circle of grasping, vicious friends (the 1's, 2's and 3's), Mister Zero snaps and murders his boss, is tried and executed, and spends the second half of the play in hell. As envisioned by Dante and director Aukin, Rice's hell is a surreal and beautiful place more welcoming than the earth above. But as Mister Zero soon discovers, it, too, is just a sterile way station for an even more depressing (and endless) future.
Visually, everything about Aukin's "Adding Machine" is clever, creative and thoughtfully realized.
Scenic designer Andrew Leiberman has created a brilliant modernistic, in-the-round, rat-race playground set where Mister Zero and his jabbering wife spin slowly on a relentless turntable and take turns riding an outdated stationary bike. Then as the action shifts to hell, the set rises overhead and both Zero and the audience descend into the Elysian Fields -- Dante's first layer of hell where life is placid and beautiful (seen here with rose-colored lighting, a shower of pink feathers and a quartet of all-seeing, eyeball-like lamps) but still empty because there is no hope of godly judgment or resolution. Adding very much to the feel of the production is Cassia Streb's original music and Colbert S. Davis IV, who create a soundscape of a detached robotic meter on earth and ethereal/upbeat sounds and music in hell.
Yet while the play is visually arresting, it feels here like a period piece. Rice's Joyce-ian stream-of-consciousness dialogue is faithfully rendered and (thanks to some brutal racist and misogynistic remarks) still stings, but without the modern trappings of industry -- laptops, Blackberrys and iPods -- or fashion, the viewer can never feel any more than an observer in Mister Zero's world.
Richard Crawford inhabits the role of Mister Zero with slothlike indulgence. Pudgy, slump-shouldered and vacant-eyed, Crawford creates a bumbling, indifferent loser who never realizes the source of his troubles is his own intolerance and ignorance. And it's easy to pinpoint the source of Zero's unhappiness with Jan Leslie Harding's hilariously grating performance as Mrs. Zero. Delivering her misery-laden lines with the rhythmic drone of a worrying mosquito, she circles and circles, zeroing in repeatedly for the kill.
The unlikely conscience of the piece is Shrdlu, the remorseful murderer hauntingly portrayed by Joshua Everett Johnson. The Oceanside actor has risen from an unknown to one of the county's best actors in the past three years, and his Playhouse stage debut is equally astonishing. Johnson has made an art of playing lost souls, but his spare Shrdlu has a depth of loss and pain not seen before in previous performances. Shrdlu, we learn, has killed his beloved mother in a senseless, unprovoked act and he longs to suffer for his sins. His entrapment in the beautiful Elysian wilderness is, for him, a fate far worse than the fires of hell.
Diane Ruppe is bubbly and ditsy as Daisy, the lonely co-worker who pines silently for Mr. Zero and kills herself to join him in hell. Her brief burst of girlish romance with Mr. Zero in Elysium is one of the few joyful moments in the script, and she makes it sing. Filling out the cast in multiple roles are Paul Morgan Stetler, Walter Belenky, Molly Fite, Liz Jenkins, Rufio Lerma and Peter Wylie.
"The Adding Machine" runs a lean 90 minutes. Audiences should be advised of the script's repeated use of racial epithets that make the play most suitable for mature audiences.
"The Adding Machine"
When: 7:30 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; through Oct. 7
Where: Potiker Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, UC San Diego, La Jolla
Tickets: $28-$60; for mature audiences
Info: (858) 550-1010
