The Adding Machine National Pastime Theater
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If that were all there was to Rice’s play, it would be an interesting but trivial relic–about as interesting and trivial as the stacks of insectlike adding machines covered with hard, dark plastic shells I used to see piled up at the Salvation Army in the early days of calculators. But Rice is after something more in the play than just another story about an obsolete employee who kills his boss. He wants to critique the social system that created and destroyed Mr. Zero. An avowed socialist, Rice called for “the development of a society in which the implements of production are employed primarily for the satisfaction of human needs.” Perhaps he believed that this “case history of one of the slave souls who are both the raw material and the product of mechanized society” would help bring about a better world.
The play is also revolutionary in its formal structure (long monologues followed by clipped, almost musical bits of dialogue) and in its refusal to bow to moral convention: Mr. Zero never repents and never regrets the loss of his life. Even when he’s entered the afterlife, the eternal summer of the Elysian Fields, and is finally given a chance at true love, Mr. Zero rejects it for the deadening certainties of a hell where he’ll be given enough mind-numbing work on a giant adding machine to keep his brain quiet. Besides, the Elysian Fields are crawling with Greenwich Village types–artists, slackers, nonconformists–who offend his lower-middle-class sensibility.
But Rice never allows his mockery to become humorless, another quality of the play Goulding gracefully brings out. No matter how stylized or dancelike his staging becomes–and he uses it all, greasepaint, black costumes, odd bits of film, random sound effects–like Rice he never loses his dark sense of humor.
