‘The Adding Machine’ Off Broadway Review: Jennifer Tilly and Daphne Rubin-Vega Turn Zeroes Into a Major Comic Plus

For anyone who studied the Theater of the Absurd back in college when the Theater of the Absurd was still being studied, you probably didn’t have Elmer L. Rice’s play “The Adding Machine” on your reading list. Even though it was staged almost two decades before the 1952 premiere of “Waiting for Godot,” this expressionistic absurdist comedy foreshadows not only Samuel Beckett but Eugène Ionesco and Edward Albee.

So why haven’t you seen (or even read) the absolutely brilliant “Adding Machine”? The original 1923 Broadway cast featured no fewer than 20 actors, with a very young Edward G. Robinson essaying the small but pivotal role of a ghost who aimlessly roams the afterlife. Those were the days when the words “double casting” did not exist in the theater. Those were also the days when audiences didn’t know what to make of such a novel, groundbreaking work.

An inspired cast of four actors now brings a thrilling revival of “The Adding Machine” to the New Group, where it opened Tuesday at the Theater at St. Clement’s. How does a cast of 20 get reduced to a neat quartet?

Thomas Bradshaw has written “revisions” that create a narrator who also gets to play no fewer than 17 roles.

The lucky and necessarily very talented comedian who takes on that awesome assignment is Michael Cyril Creighton. As narrator, Creighton recalls a fey Rod Serling, leading us through the “Twilight Zone” of this story where an office apparatchik, Mr. Zero (Daphne Rubin-Vega), murders his boss, gets the chair for his crime and meets in the afterlife his true love, Daisy (Sarita Choudhury), who has committed suicide by sticking her head into an oven and turning on the gas despite the stink making her nauseous.

Elsewhere in the story, Creighton plays no fewer than a dozen guests at a dinner party hosted by Mr. Zero and his wife, Mrs. Zero (Jennifer Tilly). A few weeks ago, I wrote about the wonderful new comedy “Mother Russia” and how the eating of a Filet-O-Fish was the most comically “delectable scene on the New York stage right now.” Lauren Yee’s play closed Off Broadway a couple of weeks ago, so the honor of that Most Delectable Eating Scene now goes to Creighton in “The Adding Machine.”

Today, it’s AI. Back in the 1920s, it was the adding machine that replaced a lot of office workers like Mr. Zero. Scott Elliott is very wise in his astute direction of this revival to keep the action way back in the past. He’s helped there by terrific work by two Broadway stalwarts, costume designer Catherine Zuber and scenic designer Derek McLane, who turns the upstage wall of the stage into a potpourri board of antique lamps and machines. Jeff Croiter’s lighting recalls the classic silent films of F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang; however, even those masters of the cinema never came up with anything as thrilling and horrifying as what Croiter does to electrocute Mr. Zero.

There’s so much male drag in theater nowadays, it’s exciting to see a woman cross-dress to such phenomenal success as does Rubin-Vega in “The Adding Machine.” Men wearing women’s clothes is funny because you end up with a big woman. When women cross-dress, it’s not as funny. You just end up with a small man, which is precisely what works here. Rubin-Vega’s Mr. Zero lives up (or down) to his name. She also does something else: Rubin-Vega fully embraces the utter inhumanity of this little man with all his petty bigotries regarding gender, sexual orientation and race. He has no humanity left because he has become a machine, and Mr. Zero needs someone — anyone — to ridicule.

With a less gifted cast, “The Adding Machine” could be a real trial to sit through. The first act is a series of monologues, some of which are delivered directly to the audience. As Mrs. Zero, Jennifer Tilly gets the first long speech as she sits in bed next to a catatonic husband who has bored her into distraction, and overeating, for years. This scene and the one on Death Row where Mrs. Zero brings her husband his favorite dish of ham and eggs are comic gems. Tilly has arrived at that wonderful Shelley Winters stage of her career, and she should be getting some of those roles that Jennifer Coolidge continues to gobble up.

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