The Adding Machine
One of those successes, first produced in 1989, was a sensitive, intelligent, visually daring version of Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine. This expressionistic send-up of white-collar life circa 1923 turned out to be ideally suited to a puppet interpretation, and not just because the play’s protagonists–an awful pair of lower-middle-class urban dwellers, Mr. and Mrs. Zero–are essentially puppets of a system that means them no good. Puppetry also heightens the best qualities of Rice’s script: the cartoonish characters, hard-boiled dialogue, and short, comic-strip-like scenes.
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The play was well received, both in Chicago, where it was staged in an old funeral home turned performance space on North Avenue, and elsewhere, including the 1992 Henson International Festival of Puppet Theater. These productions might have been the start of something big, but instead of a quick follow-up there was litigious infighting, and at about the same point the troupe lost its home.
The scenic backgrounds are also perfectly suited to Rice’s play. Each of the ten scenes in this experimental work has a different style. Some, like the opening one between Mr. and Mrs. Zero, are essentially long monologues. Others, such as a romantic dialogue in the elysian fields, are rendered in a lush, almost florid style. Some lines suggest the harsh New York accent that Judy Holliday would later make her signature. Other characters speak in an odd high-literary style that sets them apart as eccentrics and loners. These different approaches are echoed in Schwabe’s set designs. Some are spare, little more than black boxes surrounding the puppets. Others are filled with rich imagery. The graveyard scene, for example, conflates a lonely hillside filled with headstones with the three crosses on Golgotha.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/MichaelBronner.
