Adding Machine: Surprising and Subversive

This past weekend, I also took in the critically acclaimed new musical Adding Machine at the Minetta Lane Theater. This brilliant new work by Joshua Schmidt and Jason Loewith is dark but never bleak, consistently confounding expectations right to the end of the show. Schmidt also provides the challenging and idiomatic music.

The show is based on Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, a milestone of American Expressionism, and concerns the colorless life -- and colorful afterlife -- of Mr. Zero, who works as a human adding machine for 25 years until he's obviated by automation. The show at first reminded me of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock, both in subject matter and presentation. The connection is apt: Cradle was the first and only musical produced under the Federal Theater Project, and Elmer Rice at one time headed up the New York office of the FTP. But Adding Machine quickly distinguishes itself from Blitzstein's seminal work in a number of remarkable ways. What starts as your standard cautionary dystopian vision eventually careens off into something far more complex and satisfying.

Because Adding Machine is indeed a story with a message, but it's far more subversive than simply "the plight of the faceless working man." This is a musical about nothing less than man's obligation to achieve spiritual and intellectual growth. I kid you not. Schmidt, Loewith, and ultimately Rice are saying "Yeah, it sucks to be a plebe. What are you going to do about it? How are you complicit in your own subjugation? Are you secretly choosing to be a slave?" A provocative notion, indeed.

Director David Cromer has amassed a tremendously talented cast, who craft subtle yet stylized performances. Of particular note were Joel Hatch, who brings a volatile intensity to the central Mr. Zero. Also outstanding were Amy Warren as Zero's mousy coworker Daisy who blossoms into his posthumous paramour, and Cyrilla Baer as his hysterically shrill harpy of a wife. 

Adding Machine is currently scheduled to run at the Minetta Lane until May 25th. It's well worth taking in: don't let the dull title or the seemingly depressing subject matter scare you off. This is easily one of the most interesting and ambitious musicals to come along in many a season.

On a side note, I've been to the Minetta Lane Theater twice before, to see Jeffrey and Gross Indecency, but I don't remember the seats being quite this cramped. I'm 5' 9", and my inseam is only 30 inches, but even I was feeling the pinch of insufficient legroom and claustrophobic seat spacing. Perhaps the architect wanted to make the nearby Greenwich Village habitants, with their 300-square-foot basement studios, feel at home.