March/April 2010

Click a showtime below to purchase tickets.

*Mar. 13, 4:00 PM - Pay What You Can Show - Minimum $14; Walk-up Sales Only; Day of Show Only.

Special Events

• Pay What You Can Show
  Minimum $14; Walk-up Sales Only; Day of Show Only
  Saturday, Mar. 13, 4:00 PM show
• Talkback with Co-librettist Jason Loewith
  Sunday, Mar. 14, following the 3:00 PM show
• Out & About Night Reception with Cast
  Friday, Mar. 19, following the 8:00PM show
• Talkback with Cast, Director Paul Melone and Composer, Co-Librettist Joshua Schmidt
  Sunday, Mar. 21, following the 3:00 PM show
• Free Composing Workshop at Harvard
  Join Joshua Schmidt as he conducts a free composing workshop for Harvard undergraduate composers on Tuesday, March 23, 3 PM at Harvard University. Observers are welcome. For more information, please visit the Harvard website.
• Spirituality and the Arts TalkBack
  Sunday, Mar. 28, following the 3:00 PM show
• Tuesday Night Tastings
  Tuesday, Apr. 6, at 6:00 PM before the 7:30 PM performance
  at BRIX Wine Shop

Photo by Carl Van Vechten (1934)

Elmer Rice (1892 – 1967)

Pulitzer Prize Winning American Playwright

Elmer Rice grew up in New York City in circumstances modest enough that he had to drop out of school and go to work at fifteen to help support the family. When he got a job as a file clerk at a law firm, he saw himself destined for a law career. The real mitigating aspect of the position, however, was the firm’s theatrical clients. Rice had always been an inveterate theatergoer.

He studied on his own to pass the Board of Regents’ exams for the high school certificate he needed to start law school under the firm’s auspices. Even though he spent most of his time in the lecture halls reading (his other passion), Rice graduated cum laude and passed the bar exam on his first try—as soon as he turned twenty-one!

But he had ethical qualms about being a lawyer and found himself drawn more to literature and writing. Despite the consequence of losing his fiancée, he quit his job and devoted himself to trying to write a play. The setting, not surprisingly, was a criminal courtroom, but it was Rice’s unusual idea to reveal the story through flashbacks—the first American stage production to employ this cinematic technique—that landed On Trial on Broadway in 1914. The play was a sensational hit allowing him to move his family to an apartment where he’d have his own room for the first time and, eventually, win back his former fiancée.

Promised productions of several follow-ups to his stunning debut fizzled, so Rice moved his young family to Hollywood to write scenarios for Samuel Goldwyn’s silent pictures. He spent most of his two-year stint there trying to get out of his contract. Once extricated, he returned to an idyllic setting in Connecticut and attempted to write a new play. His efforts took an unexpected turn which Rice describes in his 1963 autobiography Minority Reports:

One night, long after everyone else had gone to bed, I sat wide awake on the front porch, trying to concentrate on the marriage play. Suddenly, as though a switch had been turned on or a curtain raised, a new play flashed into my mind, wholly unrelated to anything I had ever consciously thought about… In that sudden instant I saw the whole thing complete: characters, plot, incidents, even the title and some of the dialogue. Nothing like it ever happened to me before or since. I was actually possessed, my brain in a whirl, my whole being alive…. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I went to my study and began to write!

He wrote in an irresistible compulsion—“as close to automatic writing as anything I’ve ever known”—for seventeen days straight. The original manuscript was in pencil on both sides of whatever paper was handy, and Rice contends that, except for a few cuts and corrections, he never changed any of it. The play was The Adding Machine.

Rice knew that a Broadway production might be difficult to come by. He’d written the play in a stylized, intensified form known as “expressionism,” a type of theatre that emerged in postwar Germany as a reaction to Ibsen’s well-made plays. But the intrepid Theatre Guild offered it to its 1923 subscribers and, despite an initial run of only nine weeks, the play continues to fascinate theatergoers to this day.

Since he’s so closely associated with the brief period of expressionism in the American theatre precipitated by The Adding Machine, Rice was often asked to define the term. In a note to Dudley Digges, the actor playing Mr. Zero, he explained:

…in the expressionistic play we subordinate and even discard objective reality and seek to express the character in terms of his own inner life. An X-ray photograph bears no resemblance to the object as it presents itself to our vision, but it reveals the inner mechanism of the object as no mere photographic likeness can.

The subsequent plays most often associated with Rice are also innovative. Street Scene, a gritty look at what takes place in a 24-hour period on the sidewalk and stoop of a Manhattan tenement, received the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was later made into an opera by Kurt Weill. Dream Girl, written in 1945 for his second wife, the actress Betty Field, is a comedy about a young woman with melodramatic, romantic fantasies trying to decide which offer to accept from the three men in her life. To achieve seamless jumps from reality to fantasy, Jo Mielziner’s set was manipulated in full view of the audience with the transitions masked by music, lighting and sound effects.

During his long career Rice was often dissatisfied with writing for the theatre. He more than once threatened to—and actually did for a time—stop writing plays altogether. He assuaged his discontent by becoming a director, a producer and, briefly, a theatre owner. But the one thing he never gave up was his pursuit of American idealism and his belief in individual freedom.

In 1920 he helped found the Dramatists Guild to protect writers from scurrilous producers. Although he was an instigator of the Federal Theatre Project, Rice resigned his position when threatened with government censorship. In 1938 dissatisfied with their treatment at the hands of the Theatre Guild, he, along with Robert Sherwood, S.N. Behrman, Sidney Howard and Maxwell Anderson formed the Playwrights’ Company which became a major producing force for the next several decades. In later years he characteristically opposed Senator McCarthy’s attacks on theatre artists and remained more than outspoken about the commercialism of the Broadway theatre.

–Suzanne Bixby

Interviews

Jason Loewith (co-librettist) created Adding Machine in 2007 for Chicago's Next Theatre where he was the Artistic Director for six years before recently turning over the reins to Boston's own Jason Southerland. I spoke with Loewith on the phone at the end of January from his new office in DC where he is now the Executive Director of the National New Play Network (NNPN.)

What inspired Adding Machine: the Musical?

I was introduced to Kurt Weill's opera Street Scene, based on the Elmer Rice play, and just fell in love with it so I started reading every Elmer Rice play I could find. When I read the first scene of The Adding Machine, this four page harangue of Mrs. Zero yelling at her husband, I thought, "Oh, my God, this is an aria!" I also thought the multiplicity of influences Rice was playing with in composing his play would lend themselves to a multiplicity of musical ideas that, for the right composer, would be a lot of fun.

What made the concerns Rice addressed in 1923 resonate for you all these years later?

As with any classic, it operates on many different levels. What may have appealed to Rice in 1923 is not necessarily what I read into it in 1993 or 1994. Rice was responding to the rise of technology and efficiency studies and the way it was making the life of the average worker so hellish. I was more interested in how Mr. Zero was complicate in becoming part of the machine that Rice was talking about, the dehumanizing machine that grinds him up and spits him out. I've always been interested as an artist in asking questions about the American Dream, both the source of our country's great strength and an incredibly dangerous idea at the same time. Sondheim and Weidman's piece Assassins as a real touchstone for me in this regard in terms of how I thought art could actually comment on what the American Dream is and how it functions as both a strength and a great weakness. I wanted to figure out how to tell Zero's story to invoke pity and sympathy along with the horror at what a terrible human being he is and how incredibly entitled he feels to more than his fair shake.

Elmer Rice's play is closely associated with the short-lived Expressionism movement in American theatre. How did that style lend itself to the musical form?

Frankly, I think that almost every American musical is expressionist in a way. What is Expressionism? It's using the form of the work to reveal the inner psychological world of the characters. And isn't that exactly what a musical or an opera does? When you see Carmen, it's not so much about the plot, it's about how that mezzo sings-howls her emotions out.

What were you looking for in a composer to work with you on this project?

Somebody who was as excited about the adventure as I was. I needed somebody else's passion for the story to drive the collective thinking further about Mr. Zero and the choices he makes. And Josh was exactly the same kind of neurotic brand of left -leaning artistry that I was and so we became perfect artistic soul mates for the project.

Josh Schmidt (composer, co-librettist) still much in demand as a composer/sound designer for regional theatres ,juggles those assignments with the development of A Minister's Wife, a musical adaptation of Shaw's Candida. I caught up with him between project meetings the day after speaking with Jason.

How did you get involved in Adding Machine?

In late 2003, early 2004, I was doing a show at Next Theatre. One day Jason says, "I've always had this dream of adapting this piece into some sort of music theatre form. Would you consider taking a look at it and doing it?" I had never heard of The Adding Machine, but he said, "If you do it, we'll produce it," and I'm like, "Okay!" I was twenty-seven at the time and had never had anything like that offered to me before. You don't say no in those situations so I essentially accepted it without reading it.

What was your background in musical theatre?

I would not call myself a musical theatre aficionado-at least not at that point. I worked at the Skylight Opera Theatre in Milwaukee when I was in college playing rehearsal piano, programming synthesizers and designing sound. It didn't captivate my interest as much as contemporary formal composition or jazz or rock & roll or electronic music so I drifted from working within the confines of musical theatre.

What was the most challenging part of the show for you to write?

"Zero's Confession!" I wrote Mrs. Zero's aria in five days. I wrote the Elysian Fields ("Daisy's Confession") in about a week and a half, two weeks. I wrote "I'd Rather Watch You," just after I met the woman who is my wife, in three hours eating lunch one day in an office at the Next Theatre. "Zero's Confession" I stared at for a year and a half. Knowing what I know now, I'd say I have a personal relationship to the whole play, but there's an aspect of "Zero's Confession" that cuts closer to my origins, the things said there, the emotions.

So what unlocked that for you after a year and a half?

A deadline? I had started and stopped and let it sit. This was not like a commission that you could set aside a couple of months of your life to focus on it. You had to fit it in the cracks or stay up at night to get it done. Eventually, I was able to take a month off to churn it out, and it was the first thing that I tackled. I'd been thinking about it for that year and a half, but I then slammed it out in about a week. It's pretty much been what it was since then.

It sounds like you approached this project fearlessly!

Probably "foolhardy" would be the right word. We always felt very intensely focused and didn't worry about what anybody would think. We didn't have anything to lose.

-Suzanne Bixby