For many of us, an eternal punishment of fire and red guys with pitchforks is actually slightly less scary than spending our afterlife in a sea of perfectly identical cubicles, with regular memos that contradict the last one that was sent out and meetings that go on for weeks and yet still somehow never manage to accomplish anything at all. If we have to kill someone to get out of that torment, then so be it.
The playwright Elmer Rice, whose 1923 play “Adding Machine” is coming to Salt Lake’s Babcock Theatre Feb. 3-12, knows what I’m talking about (the theater is located on the lower floor of Simmons Pioneer Memorial Theatre, and tickets are available online). The play, which is being directed by Plan-B Theatre Company’s Jerry Rapier, follows Mr. Zero when he’s rewarded after years with an accounting firm with the news that he’s about to be replaced by an adding machine. He snaps, kills his boss, and is hung for it, then discovers that the afterlife is nothing like he’d imagined.
The play was also turned into a 1969 movie, which tweaked the ending (and actually brings Hell into the proceedings) and wasn’t received well critically. It was also turned into a musical in 2007, which moved to Off Broadway in 2008. Despite the addition of music, however, the New York Times review pointed out that the “impossibly bleak, improbably brilliant” show still held on firmly to the sensibilities of the original.
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