Stage review: Freedom of choice explored in Expressionistic 'Adding Machine' at U.

“THE ADDING MACHINE” by Elmer Rice, University of Utah Department of Theatre, Babcock Theatre, through Feb. 12, 801-581-7100, theatre.utah.edu/2011/the-adding-machine

SALT LAKE CITY — The drudgery of daily life is dramatically altered for Mr. Zero, a lackey businessman, when he loses his 25-year bookkeeping career to “The Adding Machine” that replaces him.

Considered to be the first American experiment in German Expressionistic theater, “The Adding Machine” receives a handsome, finely crafted blend of stylized realism and fantasy at the Babcock Theatre by the University of Utah Department of Theatre.

Guest director Jerry Rapier of Plan-B Theatre Co. leads the student cast to universally strong performances and shows a sure understanding of the fascinating jet-black dramatic comedy’s heightened expressionistic tone. “The Adding Machine” is designed to portray “an interior landscape, rather than an external one, showing what we feel instead of what we see,” according to the program notes by Mark Fossen, the play’s dramaturg.

Although written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Elmer Rice in 1923 and set at the turn of the century, “The Adding Machine” feels as fresh as if it were a contemporary play. Replace the adding machine with advanced computer technology and you have 2012.

With a lousy 9-to-5 job and a nagging harridan for a wife, the number-crunching shlub Mr. Zero (Mark Macey) is overcome with anxiety with his abrupt dismissal by the mechanical calculator that even “a high-school girl can operate.” In an impulsive rage he kills his boss (well played by Bijan J. Hosseini). Mr. Zero shows no remorse for the murder, and there’s a short scene in which the friends of Mr. and Mrs. Zero — the Ones, the Twos, the Threes, the Fours, the Fives and the Sixes — visit the dreary apartment and further define Mr. Zero’s dead-end life.

After Zero’s sentencing, he is executed and finds himself in a graveyard, with Shrdlu (Stewart Singleton, in a lively, compelling performance) as his afterlife friend who acquaints Zero with his excursion into the afterlife. While he was belligerent to her when she was his co-worker, Zero discovers that the girl of his dreams in the lonely, heartsick Daisy Diana Dorothea Devore (vividly played with appealing wistfulness by Caroline Haydon).

The objective of the play of freedom of choice becomes clear as Zero learns that he’s about to return to mortality — to “do it all again.” Will he return to make the same decisions with knowledge of hindsight or will fear overwhelm him to return to his familiar rut?