Number Crunched

The winner of the Worst Karma of 1923 award goes to the number-crunching shlub of Elmer Rice’s play “The Adding Machine.”

Rice’s Expressionist study, which retains surprising wit and potency in director Lauren Hollingsworth’s Sacred Fools Theater Company staging, follows the emblematic Mr. Zero. He lives the drone’s life, 25 years’ worth of “adding figures and waiting for 5:30.”

At work, Zero (Craig Mathers) entertains lovesick daydreams about his co-worker, Daisy Diana Dorothea Devore (Amy Jones). Then Zero gets the boot--replaced by a machine. He retaliates by killing his boss. After his own trial and execution, he shoots up to heaven, where in the Elysian Fields, having reunited with his (now dead) co-worker Daisy, Zero proves the same unreflective schmo he was on Earth.

By 1923, American playwrights had gleaned a few things from German theater, the primary source of theatrical Expressionism and its distortional techniques. Mr. Zero belongs to a long line of characters ensnared by the machine age, as well as his own rash and futile actions. More intriguingly, Rice’s protagonist is a blood relative of various small-minded American Babbitts, mindful of appearances, racist, anti-labor, conformity-plus. Even in heaven, Mr. Zero can’t shake his old hang-ups about respectability.

We’re inside a suffocating character’s head throughout “The Adding Machine.” Director Hollingsworth works well with choreographer Pogo Saito and her designers to create a cold gray universe on a budget. Zero is connected, literally, via conveyor belt to his beloved co-worker. Around them, minions glide by, walking at half-speed.

In a graveyard way-station en route to heaven, Zero chats up a fellow deceased murderer, played by Jeff Goldman. Goldman’s an exceptional hysteric, reminiscent of Gene Wilder; he knows how to make anxiety funny. Throughout, Hollingsworth doesn’t over- or under-stress the distorted atmospherics. She has an eye, but she also makes room for her better actors, chief among them Mathers, Goldman and, in bit parts, sleek, born-for-film-noir sensualist Piper Henry.

There’s a lot going on in the best of the ‘20s dreamscapes, as Michael Greif’s recent New York production of the 1928 “Machinal” revealed. Even with some routine acting, the Sacred Fools rendition of “The Adding Machine” works. Together, the material and the production illustrate the life of a guy whose enemy isn’t the machine; it’s his own underfed imagination.

BE THERE

“The Adding Machine,” Sacred Fools Theater Company, Heliotrope Theater, 660 N. Heliotrope Drive, Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 28. $10. (310) 281-8337. Running time: 2 hours.