Theatre Reviews—

An Update That Works At Sherman Playhouse

By Julie Stern

SHERMAN — Kevin Sosbe is a multi-talented actor and designer who is really best at directing, particularly of American classics. It was he who was responsible for Sherman Playhouse’s past productions of Inherit the Wind, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Desire Under the Elms.

Now he is back at Sherman directing the expressionistic drama by Elmer Rice, The Adding Machine. Performances continue until September 2.

Originally staged by New York’s Theater Guild in 1923, the play chronicles the meaningless life and afterlife of a hapless white-collar clerk, Mr Zero — a man so timid and colorless that after 25 years on the job his boss still doesn’t know his name, or care to learn it. In fact, on that twenty-fifth anniversary, the boss fires him because Zero — whose job consists of adding up the day’s sales receipts — can now be replaced much more cheaply by a machine.

The devastating shock of being cut loose from the only job he has ever had pushes Zero to explode into violence. He murders his boss, thereby setting in motion the end of his own earthly existence and the discovery that for some people the afterlife doesn’t get any better.

Karl Marx once wrote about the “lumpen proletariat:” down-trodden and dehumanized manual workers who were alienated from any sort of meaningful life by the hardship of their labor and the social and economic deprivation imposed on them by capitalist society.

In Adding Machine, Mr Rice portrays a different kind of dehumanization that comes from emotional depravation and a life of mental drudgery based on conformity and surface respectability, but devoid of passion, humor, beauty or pride.

The characters have no names, only numbers. When Mr and Mrs One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six come to the Zeros’ for a party they are all dressed in the same outfits with identical wigs, the men’s faces covered by plastic masks. (One of Mr Sosbe’s modern additions is to have them whip out matching cell phones in the middle of cliché-filled conversation).

An even more effective device is Mr Sosbe’s use of Beatles music, opening with “Nowhere Man” and punctuating the show with other songs of alienation and loss, including the very beautiful “Yesterday.”

Steve Manzino gives a typically strong performance as the confused and inarticulate Zero. Jennifer Lane doubles as both Zero’s shrewish wife and his unmarried fellow clerk, Daisy Diana Dorothea Devore, who speculates on how her life would be if only he were interested in her.

As a theatrical experience, The Adding Machine is both harrowing and pathetic. Mr Sosbe’s update works effectively, and the audience only has to think about the lilting tones of the business reporter who announces how the latest consolidations and plant closings have led to an increase in profits and a rise in the market price to understand that the playwright Rice still has something to say to us.

(Performances of The Adding Machine will be presented Friday and Saturday evenings at 8:30 and Sunday afternoons at 3 through September 2. Tickets for $14 for adults and $12 for students and seniors.

Call Sherman Playhouse at 860/354-3622 for reservations or other information).