Theater review | New company pounds out a strong start with "Adding Machine"

Theater Review |

For its first production, Seattle's New Century Theatre Company does not take the easy way out.

Instead, this actor-initiated, professional ensemble has given us a gutsy, go-for-it staging of an 85-year-old play that still challenges theater artists and audiences.

New Century's vigorous, full-bodied take on Elmer Rice's "The Adding Machine," guided by intrepid director John Langs, is part museum-quality 1920s expressionism, part contemporary whiz-bang acting and effects, but all gung-ho spirit.

On first look, this rendition of the classic parable about an insignificant cog in the grinding wheel of commerce — purposefully named Mr. Zero — can seem accomplished but almost textbook academic in its studied effects.

But the production stays with you. And if the highly stylized look, bravado acting, and the untidy, aggressive provocations of Rice's imaginatively ungainly script keep dogging you later, that's exactly as it should be.

"The Adding Machine" begins with a long, remarkable monologue, a kind of dystopian version of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in James Joyce's "Ulysses," spoken in one rushing acidic breath by Amy Thone, whose bitterly unfulfilled Mrs. Zero is a marvel of righteous toxicity.

The drama continues with Mr. Zero's workday as one of many lowly department-store accountants, in a smartly choreographed chorus of number-crunching — interspersed with the interior sexual and revenge fantasies of shlubby Zero (the excellently clueless Paul Morgan Stetler) and his haggard co-worker Daisy (Jennifer Lee Taylor).

Thereby follows, in the same starkly unified décor of blacks and grays, Mr. Zero's abrupt persecution by automation (the adding machine replaces the guy with the pencil), a desultory party in his home (with a parlor full of bigoted drones just like him and the Mrs.), and a Kafka-esque arrest and murder trial.

But then Rice throws a monkey wrench in the mechanism. He ironically lifts his vacant, oppressed Everyman into the Elysian fields (in Greek mythology, the resting place of heroes).

There this dubious candidate for heavenly redemption encounters the liberated, lovelier Daisy and gets a stern lesson from a guilt-ridden fellow traveler, Shrdlu (a pun on a nonsense phrase from the days of Linotype printing, and played by Darragh Kennan, with mesmerizing, otherworldly intensity).

Basically, the myopic antihero Zero gets a chance at a happy afterlife. Which he screws up royally — making him complicit in his fate, not just a victim of it.

It's a bizarre turn of events, as is the Buddhism-tinged finale of "The Adding Machine." And when you consider that this strange, fascinating play debuted on a 1920s Broadway dominated by glittering revue-style musicals like "The Ziegfeld Follies," it's astonishing.

Rice was a lawyer by trade. And his stage expressionism was not entirely without precedent. By 1923, young Eugene O'Neill was shaking up the American theater with his restless experimentation. In Germany, an epic theater revolution was taking shape. And there was a corresponding expressionism movement in European film, as in Robert Wiene's "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."

It's not surprising that "The Adding Machine," which has had many revivals across the decades, is in vogue again during today's high-tech revolution, which has displaced plenty of workers, too. (A well-received new musical based on the play had a recent run Off Broadway.)

New Century has marshaled considerable resources to enrich its own version: a cast of more than a dozen able actors, an eerily percussive score by sound designer Rob Witmer, tone-true expressionistic lighting (by Geoff Korff) and sets (by Jennifer Zeyl).

It all adds up to a lengthy one-act that's confident in its theatricality, but not simplistic in its impact. And it is a strong start for a promising new company, of laudable artistic rigor.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com