Zero to Anti-Hero

Review: Adding Machine
SpeakEasy Stage Company, Boston
April 3, 2010

Blanche DuBois once transferred to a streetcar named Elysian Fields. But who suspected to someday see that mythical limbo on stage, let alone in a musical, and have it be both deflating and buoyant?

That's the double-edged sword of Adding Machine, now wrapping its Boston run after an Off-Broadway debut in 2008. Based on a 1923 play by Elmer Rice, the show should be continually depressing. A laid-off civil employee murders his boss, confesses his hatred toward the world, and is executed only to find himself adrift in the afterlife. But this SpeakEasy Stage Company production finds its peculiar charms.

"I'd rather watch you," the secretary Daisy sings as the subway shuffles along. She's likely headed uptown, passing 42nd Street, 50th Street, 59th Street. But for the first time, the audience feels a reprieve from numbers. Our ears have been assaulted with a contemporary score: shrill quasi-arias; numbingly rhythmic chants of accounting figures; recitative sprinkled with electronica that sounds both futuristic and salvaged from 1981. The music produces the feeling of dislocation, of numerical simplicity uprooted.



Yet everything subsides when, for three brief minutes, Daisy croons an old-fashioned 1920s radio ballad. Her pressures at work and her feelings for her boss, Mr. Zero, fade away. So do our perceptions of Adding Machine as an inaccessible work, no matter how initially aggressive. Authors Joshua Schmidt and Jason Loewith dip into period pastiche just a few times--you can count them on one hand, no machine needed--but are equally playful in the dense, more atonal musical scenes.

SpeakEasy's cast is impressive, braying the music without (I hope) vocal damage while exposing their sad-sack characters' humanity. Brendan McNab doesn't turn Mr. Zero (a murderer, racist, and misanthrope, remember?) into anything redemptive. He's put-upon but still virile. He bellows with gravel in his throat, whether angry or elated, as when he receives ham and eggs in prison from his wife. Mrs. Zero nags at her pathetic husband in a brutally high soprano; Amelia Broome plays her with vigor and even warmth as she sees off Mr. Zero on death row. John Bambery plays Shrdlu, a passionate prisoner who offed his ma with a leg of lamb. His rich-voiced rendering of a gospel parody fits with the oddness around him, maybe because he seems so sincere.



Despite the industrial surroundings, pounding into us that men are cogs in the machine, the inventiveness of Adding Machine takes it beyond the bleak. I wished for more songs that evoked the gay twenties, or even the rotten sin-filled twenties, but the score doesn't compromise so easily. Only Daisy (a winsome, working-class Liz Hayes) offers the bloom of hope. When she enters Elysian Fields, though, she despairs, "I might as well have stayed alive." Thankfully, this production has enough life to make up the difference.