Breaking Character: As revelations of Harvey Weinstein’s abuses made national headlines, our cast and production team pondered a telling and troubling comment expressed by a man following one of our performances.
We had just opened the regional premiere of Adding Machine: A Musical at Theatre Three in Dallas. Cynically funny and complex, Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt’s 2009 Off-Broadway musical is an adaptation of the 1923 play The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice. It centers on Mr. Zero on the day of his twenty-fifth anniversary at a dead-end accounting job at a department store. When he realizes he’s to be fired and replaced by a highly efficient machine, Zero murders his boss on the spot, is summarily executed, and then, with chilling ambivalence, faces the prospect of eternal freedom in the afterlife.
2 comments:
I’m somewhat familiar with the Adding Machine since I read the play about a year ago. I found the play interesting, though I did dislike basically all of the characters. I do find it interesting that this man decided that he was so upset about Mrs. Zero’s character that he felt the need to tell the music director and that he felt like he could speak for every straight man in the theater. I feel like it must have been personal for him in some way. Maybe he has had significant others that spoke to him the way Mrs. Zero speaks to Mr. Zero in the past? Obviously there is no way to know, and there is definitely something concerning about the idea that he may (and many men do) consider it acceptable and universal for men to simply tune out women if they are being aggressive or emotional. To be fair, as I remember it, Mrs. Zero isn’t being emotional, she is basically being outright abusive. Honestly, I think what made that man so uncomfortable could’ve been seeing a woman have power over a man in their relationship. In theory he could’ve been reacting to the abusive language itself, but I can’t help but feel like he wouldn’t have been complaining to the music director if it has been Mr. Zero verbally abusing Mrs. Zero rather than the other way around.
So the fact that a man said that that they can speak in outrage for every man in the theatre due to Mrs. Zero's character, proves that this show is getting exactly the reactions that it should be in this day and age. It says a lot about this man and the complex that e brings, and his ability to just tune out a woman. Elmer Rice is very concise in the way he writes plot lines and characters, they're complex and they say something about the viewer at the time. To my surprise, the man was outraged even at the fact that she wasn't passive to Mr. Zero, I expected just a little more from audiences today, but I guess even that is too much to ask for. Its important that these characters continue to portray the characters that it was intended to portray and not conform to the likings of a typical straight man.
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