Orange County Calendar : 71 Years Later, It Still Adds Up : Theater: Elmer Rice’s radical ‘Machine,’ revived at Cal State Fullerton, is like a morality play whose issues remain relevant today, says its director.

Elmer Rice’s active career in the theater lasted longer than any other American playwright’s, including that of his famous contemporary Eugene O’Neill. During a span of half a century, Rice turned out roughly 50 plays. At his peak in the ‘20s and ‘30s, he seemed to dominate Broadway, not only as a prolific writer but as a firebrand voice for the disenfranchised.

Yet Rice is not a name to conjure with these days. Most ordinary theatergoers probably haven’t heard of him. If people know of him at all, it is perhaps for his 1929 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Street Scene,” a naturalistic depiction of tenement life in New York, later remade as an opera with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Langston Hughes.

But Meredith Wright has chosen to stage an earlier, more radical play: “The Adding Machine,” opening tonight at Cal State Fullerton’s Performing Arts Center. The revival comes 71 years after the original production burst like a thunderclap on the Broadway scene, earning Rice huge acclaim as the great American avatar of Expressionist drama.

Wright, a 32-year-old graduate director completing her Master of Fine Arts degree, likens the rarely seen work to a morality play. It tells the cautionary tale of Mr. Zero, a lecherous white-collar drone unhappily married to a shrew. He is fired by his boss after 25 years on the job and replaced in the name of efficiency by an automatic adding machine.

“Something in the nature of what we’re now going through as a country--a kind of spiritual, economic and philosophic crisis--makes it fitting to do a revival,” Wright proposed in a recent interview. “I think it’s a very clever play with a lot of timely things to say. I don’t think it’s Shakespeare. It has its flaws. But there’s a lot of humor and a lot of meaning in it.”

Rice thought of “The Adding Machine” as an amalgam of “comedy, melodrama, fantasy, satire and polemics.” He described it as “the case history of one of those enslaved souls who are both the raw material and the product of a mechanized society.”

Wright said she wants to make her production “as new and remarkable as (the play) must have been when it was first done in 1923.” A tall order to be sure, but she seems to specialize in uncommon revivals at Cal State. Last season she directed “The Kingdom of Earth,” a neglected work by Tennessee Williams; she followed it with Euripides’s little known “Helen.”

The characters in “The Adding Machine” are symbolic abstractions--Mr. and Mrs. Zero’s social circle consists of the Ones, Two, Threes and so on--but “they make a strong personal statement,” Wright contended. “Somehow the whole idea relates to living in Los Angeles and feeling like a zero, which I think many people are struggling with.

“They’re trying to achieve success, and yet they can’t help wondering whether they’re looking for the right thing or barking up the wrong tree. They’re working to achieve all those goodies they want in life. At the same time they’re worried that they’ve misplaced their souls along the way. The way we live seems so full of greed and meaninglessness.”’

A relative newcomer to Southern California, Wright seems determined to climb the ladder of success herself. That is why she came here to enroll in graduate school, after professional experience in technical and administrative jobs at the Arena Stage and the Shakespeare Theatre, both in Washington, D.C.

“I realized that if you want a lifetime career as a director in this country, you have to have an MFA,” she said. “I kept noticing that people who did the hiring were interested in my background, but they usually offered the better jobs that took you up the directing ladder to somebody with an MFA.”

Born in Pascagoula, Miss., where her father was a civil-rights lawyer during the early ‘60s, Wright grew up in Washington and received her bachelor’s degree in theater from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. For two years she also trained in acting and directing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Drama Studio, both in London.

She has managed to keep her foot in the professional door even as a grad student. She spent a year on staff at the now-defunct Los Angeles Theatre Center, assisting producing director Diane White. Wright also served as company manager for two LATC tours of Reza Abdo’s avant-garde epic “The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice” to Canada and Europe.

More recently, taking a break from rehearsals for “The Adding Machine,” she returned to Europe to work as the assistant director of the first “Star Trek” stage production: “The Lost Voyage of the Enterprise.” It closed Nov. 26 after a successful limited run at the 800-seat Churchill Theatre in Bromley, a suburb of London.

“I never thought all the ‘Star Trek’ episodes that I watched as a teen-ager would come in so handy,” she said.

* “The Adding Machine” by Elmer Rice opens tonight at 8 and will continue through Dec. 11 at the Cal State Fullerton Performing Arts Center, State College Boulevard at Nutwood Avenue, Fullerton. Performances are in the Recital Hall. $6 to $8. (714) 773-3371.