“The Adding Machine” and the Mechanics of Living – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: A timely Expressionist revival centered on work, worth, and repetition by The New Group

By Ross

That clanking mechanical sound takes over the room before anything else has a chance to. It’s a heartless sound, a metallic clank, steady and relentless, echoing through the theatre, and we feel it in our bones. An old adding machine sits alone under a harsh spotlight, its lever striking down again and again, as if pulled by a compulsive ghost who can’t let go, feeding an endless roll of paper that gathers in a quiet, growing pile at its base. It is a simple image, almost hypnotic, and impossible to ignore, but metaphorically deep and unsettling. All before a word is spoken. The Adding Machine sharply tells us exactly what kind of world we are about to enter, one where repetition replaces purpose, and where the human body risks becoming just another extension of the machine, another number to be subtracted rather than being added to the argument.

Presented by The New Group at their new home, Theatre at St. Clement’s, this revival, directed solidly by Scott Elliott (TNG’s The Seven Year Disappear), finds striking relevance in a play first written over a century ago. Elmer Rice’s original 1923 work, revised by Thomas Bradshaw (TNG’s The Seagull/Woodstock, NY), stands as a landmark of American Expressionism, a theatrical movement less interested in realism than in the inner lives of its characters. What emerges here is a reframing, a brooding old-school examination, thanks to the superb costuming by Catherine Zuber (CSC’s The Baker’s Wife), that places the anxieties of automation and displacement squarely in the present moment, where the fear of being replaced by a machine no longer feels abstract.

That sense of quiet AI-dread is immediately grounded in the domestic bed of Mr. and Mrs. Zero. The set, designed with meticulous attention to detail by Derek McLane (Off-Broadway’s This World of Tomorrow), surrounds the characters with towering walls of filing drawers, each holding fragments of lives reduced to files and forms. A Murphy bed folds down center stage, revealing the very game Daphne Rubin-Vega (Public’s Miss You Like Hell) as Mr. Zero lying motionless beside the intoxicating presence of Jennifer Tilly (“Bullets Over Broadway“) as his wife, Mrs. Zero. Tilly heroically launches into a monologue that feels both endless and essential. Her delivery is exacting and extraordinary. She speaks of small things, gossip, films, the passing details of a life that has never quite expanded beyond this room, yet beneath it all lies a deep well of disappointment and resignation. It is a scene that should feel mundane, even boring, as the Zeros are often described as by their friends, but instead, that moment becomes quietly devastating and difficult to look away from.

Rubin-Vega’s Mr. Zero exists in contrast to almost all of his life; still, distant, and increasingly difficult to read. When the action shifts to the office, that distance fractures somewhat. Paired with the magnificent Sarita Choudhury (Mira Nair’s “Mississippi Masala“) as his counterpart, Daisy, the mechanical rhythm of voiced numbers begins to take on a different entity. What is spoken aloud is precise, professional, and somewhat abrasive, yet what is expressed internally is something else entirely. Desire, frustration, and longing all simmer passionately beneath the surface, creating a tension that is both absurd and strangely touching. It is one of the production’s most effective sequences, capturing the dissonance between what is lived and what is left unexpressed.

That dissonance defines the play’s central turn. After twenty-five years of service, Mr. Zero discovers that, instead of a promotion, he is being replaced by the very machine that was echoing through the theatre when we arrived. His response is swift and shocking, though never shown directly. Instead, the production allows the audience to sit with the aftermath, the weight of what has been done, and what it all means. Michael Cyril Creighton (Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building”) moves fluidly and fascinatingly through multiple roles, serving as our guide, authority figure, soulful companion, and commentator, his presence tying together the shifting worlds of the play with precision and control. Beyond that, he’s also just a joy to witness his swivel chair reframings.

The first act builds with a careful sense of accumulation, each scene layering onto the next until the inevitability of Mr. Zero’s fate feels predetermined. Even moments of humour, particularly in the dinner party sequence where Mrs. Zero attempts to impose order on a room determined to resist it, carry an undercurrent of unease. We can thank Creighton for that. The laughter lands, but it never fully releases the tension. What follows is a death row march with a grieving soon-to-be widow and a mountain of ham and eggs, bringing Act One to an end in the most electrifying way possible, leaving many in the audience engaged, but more importantly, curious about where this could possibly go next.

The shift into Act Two’s afterlife opens the play into a whole different realm, moving from domestic realism into something far more abstract and surreal. Here, the production magnificently leans into its Expressionist roots, exploring questions of identity, purpose, and what remains of a person once their function has been stripped away. The world becomes fluid, disorienting, and strangely seductive. It is a bold transition that questions religion, goodness, and purpose, and one that the cast navigates with clarity, even as the narrative itself loosens its starched white collar.

Not every moment lands with the same precision. The second act occasionally drifts, circling its ideas rather than driving them forward. Yet even in those moments, there is something compelling about the journey itself. The play is not interested in a neat resolution. It is interested in process, in the act of searching for meaning in a system that offers very little of it in return. That search is what ultimately defines this production.

The Adding Machine continues its work, both literal and symbolic, a reminder of the systems that reduce lives to numbers and output. And it all adds up to something far greater than the sum of its parts, even as the man at its center fails to do the same. And within that mechanized world, something fragile persists. A moment of actual connection flickers into view, brief and uncertain, offering the suggestion that something else, deeper and more meaningful, might be possible if only it could be held onto long enough.

The question that hangs over us all as we too look across the metaphoric Elysian Fields is not what will happen next, but whether anything has changed. There is a sense, as the play moves toward its final moments, that the cycle has already decided its course. The opportunity for something different feels present, right in front of Mr. Zero, within reach, yet never fully grasped. The energy of opportunity lingers, not as a promise of change, but inside the recognition of how difficult it is to break from the patterns that have shaped a life so completely. That first symbolic sound returns in a new way. The steady clank of the machine no longer feels like a warning, but something closer to a rhythm that cannot be easily escaped. It continues, indifferent and exacting, carrying forward the same motion we have watched from the beginning. And somewhere inside that sound, the weight remains.