The Adding Machine

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About the Show

A clerk replaced by automation spirals through a surreal reckoning with work, marriage, and control.

Mr. Zero is an unremarkable office worker whose life is defined by routine, marital obligation, and monotonous labor. When his employer replaces him with a calculating machine, he is abruptly displaced and forced into a destabilizing journey that carries him through violence, punishment, and an afterlife shaped by systems beyond his control. The narrative unfolds as a stylized examination of labor, obedience, and mechanization.

The play was written by Elmer L. Rice, a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright known for Street Scene, and is presented here with revisions by Thomas Bradshaw (Marys Seacole, Job), whose work often interrogates power and social structures. Direction is by Scott Elliott, Artistic Director of The New Group (The Seagull/Woodstock, NY, Jerry Springer: The Opera), whose productions frequently revisit canonical texts through contemporary frameworks.

Staged at The Theater at St. Clement’s, the revival situates Rice’s early twentieth-century satire within a modern theatrical context while preserving its episodic structure and expressionistic tone.

Critic Reviews (9)

"'The Adding Machine' has enormous potential to reverberate right now, when dehumanization is pervasive — like the job-replacing adoption of A.I., and the othering of anyone who can be portrayed as the enemy."
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"It is rare to leave a play thinking about the lighting, but Croiter’s top-notch work helps breathe life into an otherwise lumbering production. Thank god he hasn’t been replaced by a machine yet."
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"Unfortunately, given the talent involved, this Adding Machine falls short of the sum of its parts."
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"It’s disappointing because The Adding Machine, in its strange, cynical, wonderfully metaphysical way, has more to say about our contemporary bondage than most new plays presented on New York’s stages."
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'Presumably, Elliott and company see The Adding Machine as a mordant commentary on twenty-first-century unease, defined by uncertain employment, a shaky economy, and the creeping fear that AI will devour us all. It's not the aptest vehicle for such thoughts, however, and it is further undermined by uncertain direction and needless interpolations."
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"This production works beautifully on all levels. The Adding Machine is a triumph for The New Group at its new Off-Broadway home."
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The 1923 postmodern absurdist classic of capitalistic oppression is revived with powerful performances.
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This is not to say that the production doesn’t possess moments to appreciate. Taken all in all, however, the New Group’s revival of The Adding Machine simply doesn’t add up.
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