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by Elmer Rice, directed by Alice Fox Lundy

Leroy Street Theatre, Toronto Fringe Festival, Puppy Sphere, 639 Queen Street East, Toronto

July 2-13, 2025

Lt. Charles: “You’re a failure, Zero, a failure. A waste product. A slave to a contraption of steel and iron”

Any history of American theatre mentions The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice as the prime representative of Expressionism on the American stage, yet, until now, chances to see a professional production of this 1923 play have been close to nonexistent. Now Leroy Street Theatre has come to the rescue and is presenting Rice’s play in an adaptation by director Alice Fox Lundy and dramaturg Guillermo Verdecchia. The result is a well-acted and designed production of a devastating satire that is all too relevant today.

Rice’s play begins innocently enough as a satire of marital relations. He shows that Mr. Zero (the name is a sign of his rank on the social hierarchy) suffers in silence while his wife berates him about every aspect of their life together. In particular, she wonders why after working for 25 years at the same job in the same company he has never asked for a raise.

Mr. Zero goes from his unhappy home to his unhappy workplace in a department store where his job is pure tedium. His job is to add up all the sales figures that his co-worker Daisy reads to him. The job is so boring that both Mr. Zero and Daisy have inner monologues about other topics while they work. Mr. Zero thinks about how much he hates his wife. Daisy thinks about ways of committing suicide. Chin Palipane’s lighting carefully distinguishes the couple’s inner monologues from their ordinary dialogue. The two get on each other’s nerves but it’s clear that they are attracted to each other. Indeed, Daisy seems to be hopelessly in love with Zero.

As it happens Zero does not have to seek out the Boss to ask for a raise. The Boss seeks him out. The only problem is that the Boss gives Zero his notice and tells him he will be replaced with an adding machine because the machine is more efficient and accurate than humans are. This so enrages Zero that he murders his Boss.

At this point we have completed only two of the play’s seven scenes. The theme of replacing a human being with a machine already shows how relevant the play remains. Yet, Rice’s satire extends beyond a critique of unhappy marriage, mindless work and soulless capitalism. In the remaining sections of the play, Rice extends his satire to the hypocrisy of society that condemns crime yet is fascinated by criminals. We should recall that the play Chicago, about competing star murderesses that inspired the 1975 musical, was written only three years after Rice’s play.

As the action progresses we see that Rice’s satire is not finished with the nature of this world. It extends into the next. We see Mr. Zero arise from the dead where he meets a Mr. Shrdlu, whose conscience is tortured because he murdered his mother. The two discover the terrible fact that if there was no justice in on earth there also is no justice in the afterlife. And Rice’s critique goes even farther than this by demonstrating that the universe has no meaning at all. While The Adding Machine is hailed for its embrace of Expressionism, this production makes clear that the play is a forerunner of Absurdism.

It is eye-opening to find that such radical ideas were expressed so long ago. It is exhilarating to see a company put forward those ideas with such insight and theatricality. The original play has 23 named characters, but Lundy and Verdecchia have managed with clever editing and doubling to stage the play with only five actors. In a scene requiring twelve party guests, designer Ana Rojas Sanchez has four actors wear masks, each with three faces. Countless scene changes are cleverly managed such as when the deceased Daisy rolls herself up in the AstroTurf of the Elysian Fields and is pulled off stage.

Lundy has assembled a top-notch ensemble for the production. It would be very easy to sentimentalize the poor schlemiel that Mr. Zero is. But Tim Walker resists this temptation. We see that his Mr. Zero silently fumes while his wife berates him, but his obtuseness to Daisy’s love for him both during his life and after his death makes us wonder whether Mr. Zero is simply as self-centred as all the other human beings in the play except Daisy. He shows Zero as also notably less intelligent and less sensitive than Mr. Shrdlu. Nevertheless, Walker is able to arouse sympathy for Zero as a flawed human being who does not deserve the meaningless of his life on earth or the meaninglessness he faces after death. Walker gives the impression that Zero’s unhappiness has caused him to suppress so much rage that it bursts out when his one hope for betterment is thwarted.

Jennifer McEwen excels as Mrs. Zero. McEwen is able to deliver Mrs. Zero’s long monologues of complaint about her everyday life and about Mr. Zero with complete naturalness and a comic obliviousness to their effect on Mr. Zero. I’ve never seen an actor imitate so well the verbal and gestural habits of speech delivery that one sees in lower class characters in the early talkies. McEwen does show that Mrs. Zero does have a softer side when Mrs. Zero brings food to Mr. Zero in prison the day of his execution. But McEwen and Walker make a comic disaster out of what could seem like a chance for reconciliation when the two characters, perhaps strained with being too nice, can’t keep from falling back into their old ways.

Dani Zimmer is an otherworldly Daisy even in the scenes when she is alive. Zimmer reveals that Daisy is haunted by death both from the boredom of her work and from her unrequited love for Mr. Zero. After death, paradoxically, Daisy is happier than we have ever seen her. Zimmer makes the scene very painful when Daisy realizes that, despite her great sacrifice, Mr. Zero will ignore her for all eternity.

Jamar Adams-Thompson plays several roles but is most notable as the mysterious matricide Mr. Qwerty, whom Mr. Zero meets after death. Adams-Thompson speaks in a gentle, far-away tone of voice as if Qwerty is never mentally in the present when he is speaking. This has an eerie, disquieting effect that makes us wonder whether Qwerty who seems so intelligent and refined may not be of sound mind. Qwerty is the one who first perceives that there is no divine justice in the afterlife, which has the ominous corollary that there may be no such thing as justice at all.

Breanna Dillon’s Lieutenant Charles is the exact opposite of Adams-Thompson’s Qwerty. Dillon is harsh where Adams-Thompson is delicate, an authoritarian whereas he is a victim. We assume Charles is an otherworldly creature but have no evidence to judge this except for her extensive knowledge of what happens to a soul after its sojourn in the Elysian Fields. Rice gives Charles an extraordinarily long speech on this subject, punctuated by remarks from Zero, that Dillon delivers with such malign relish that she received a round of applause at its conclusion.

To reach a running time of only 85 minutes, Lundy and Verdecchia have judiciously cut the play and eliminated many of its original 23 characters. What we miss, especially in the dining scene involving Mrs. Zero’s twelve party guests in Scene 3 is Rice’s critique of misogyny, racism and xenophobia inherent in the society of his day (and, as we know, not only his day). The party begins politely enough but ends with the guests blaming foreigners for America’s labour problems . Mr. Six exclaims, “America for the Americans” after which all twelve shout, “That’s it! Damn foreigners!” It’s rather too bad this section had to be excluded since it would demonstrate just how long such insidious sentiments have persisted in a country dedicated to liberty and justice for all.

In fact, Rice’s satire of romance, capitalism, justice and religion is so thorough that it is hard to see how The Adding Machine could ever be revived in the present political climate south of the border. Therefore, we owe a debt of gratitude to the Leroy Street Theatre for bringing this important but seldom-performed play to the stage to remind us of the power of the theatre to question the status quo.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Adding Machine cast collage by Ana Rojas Sanchez; Tim Walker as Mr. Zero and Dani Zimmerman as Daisy; Jennifer McEwen as Mrs. Zero. © 2025 Leroy Street Theatre.

For tickets visit: fringetoronto.com.