"Expressionism" is one of those useful artistic terms that cover a number of things, depending upon who is talking about what. In cinema, the 1920 German Expressionist film "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" depicted deranged mental states through distorted special effects. By mid 20^th century, American painting’s Abstract Expressionism was finding manifestation in Jackson Pollack’s drip paintings.

For Elmer Rice, whose 1923 play "The Adding Machine" is considered an Expressionist drama, Expressionism seemed to have something to do with what he called "new concepts of the mechanized man and the unconscious man," by which he apparently meant Socialism and Freudianism. A lifelong Socialist, Rice’s concerns about the effects of working conditions on the human soul obviously inform his play’s themes. And Sigmund Freud’s then-popular ideas about the subconscious conspicuously shaped Rice’s depiction of the inner life of his characters.

When asked to explain his Expressionism more clearly, Rice wrote: "It attempts to go beyond mere representation and to arrive at interpretation. The author attempts not so much to depict events faithfully as to convey to the spectator what seems to be their inner significance. To achieve this end, the dramatist often finds it expedient to depart entirely from objective reality and to employ symbols, condensations and a dozen devices which to the conservative must seem arbitrarily fantastic."

All this, however, may be so much after-the-fact authorial rationalizing. In the event, Rice sat down with a flash inspiration intending to write a play about marriage and, after a seventeen day spate of spontaneous writing, he found he had produced this excellent and original blend of stylized realism and fantasy, "The Adding Machine"– an American classic which has held the stage ever since. His fancy explanations came afterwards.

Since it tells the story of a henpecked accountant who is fired from his job to be replaced by a mechanical calculator, many commentators focus on the play’s supposedly prophetic theme of technological unemployment, often scanting Rice’s real and more timeless message.

After all, by the 1920s the industrial revolution with its epic workplace disruptions had already been steaming along for a century and a half, as noted by Marx and Engels even earlier. And Rice’s pathetic Everyman, Mr. Zero, might even have harked back still further and been the reincarnation of some ancient Babylonian scribe whose clay cuneiform skills were displaced by reed pens and papyrus.

Indeed, the theme of reincarnation proves a more pervasive aspect of the play than industrialization. Rather like Christopher Durang’s recent "Mrs. Witherspoon" (2005), Mr. Zero is eventually discovered to be an ancient soul of, however, rather discouraging shallowness. In a playful treatment (again as in Durang) of concepts from Vedanta and Buddhism, the protagonist, once again in the Afterlife and still Karma-deficient after many, many attempts, strenuously resists enlightenment, Nirvana, or, futilely, any further transmigrations of soul.

This has much in common with other fantastical treatments in drama or fiction, before and since, of a spiritual Hereafter – usually drawn from a Christian perspective, but seldom wholly serious. Often, in such cartoonish versions of Heaven or Hell, the conventional expectations of posthumous rewards and punishments are paradoxically reversed, and Rice was no exception here. George Bernard Shaw (one of Rice’s acknowledged models) had much sport turning Hell on its head in the dream third act of "Man and Superman" (1905). Ferenc Molnár’s "Liliom" (1909) offers another such dramatic scenario of a comically lenient Last Judgment. And even the Christian apologist C. S. Lewis’ dream-vision allegory "The Great Divorce" (1945) represented a mostly tedious Hell where damned souls would remain only if they stubbornly refused to go to Heaven. Whatever spiritual truths may be implied by such allegories, their purely psychological insights can be compelling.

Along these same lines, Mr. Zero – who is played with entertaining shlubbishness by Richard Crawford in the La Jolla Playhouse’s happily delightful production under the direction of Daniel Aukin – presents a wry and pitying but not entirely sympathetic portrait of a human soul severely limited by his own increasingly self-restricting choices. Mr. Zero and two other deceased characters (Shrdlu, a guilt-ridden matricide, played with sepulchral empathy by Joshua Everett Johnson, and Daisy, a drifty, lovelorn suicide, played with appealing wispy wistfulness by Diana Ruppe) in due course find themselves wandering, bewildered, through what they call the Elysian Fields – a vision of the afterlife adapted from classical mythology. "The most desirable of all places," Shrdlu calls this paradise, "where only the wisest dwell – the most favored and pure spirits." The place, in fact, seems to be filled with artists, idlers, pleasure-seekers, and not a few criminals. Shrdlu seems content to stay there, gradually salving his guilty conscience. Mr. Zero and Daisy (unrequited lovers back on Earth) frolic and dance for a time together to the tune of Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen’s "Accentuate the Positive" as sung by Bing Crosby and Sonny Tufts (1944).

But eventually, in a petulant and ugly outburst of middle-class morality, Mr. Zero refuses to remain in the Elysian Fields if he has to share the place with those whom he regards as lowlifes and riffraff. (Earlier effusions of Zero’s bigotry have not endeared his character to us either.) Consequently, Mr. Zero chooses instead to spend what he assumes will be eternity disporting himself with a big adding machine. In the notable 1923 premiere production staged by Philip Moeller, the creator of the role, Dudley Diggs, cavorted memorably, a la Archy the cockroach, on the gigantic keyboard of the machine. Director Aukin presents the scene differently, with Crawford’s Zero hugging what looks to be an unwieldy old Wang word processor (a piece of outmoded technology that bears its own special associations). Finally, however, after but a few decades, Mr. Zero is forcibly ejected from this unearthly and womblike refuge and dispatched by blasé and cynical afterlife attendants back down to his unending and futile cycle of Samsara.

Oddly, this apparently grim parable produces – at least in this La Jolla Playhouse version – a sense of exhilaration. Perhaps it is because one is allowed to feel superior to the forever unsalvageable soul of Mr. Zero, while our sympathies are directed towards the more hopeful Daisy and Shrdlu. The afterlife is clearly intended to be symbolic. Rice is urging us to embrace our own real lives positively and to take responsibility for them – a notion that may lie deeper than, but possibly lead towards, the worldly Elysium of Rice’s Socialist ideals.

Andrew Lieberman has concocted a fascinating scenic design for the arena configuring of the Potiker Theatre, a rotating circle, with inset circular pits, that separates and rises like a flying saucer at the intermissionless play’s midpoint. Japhy Wiedeman’s lighting design enhances these effects. And Maiko Matsushima’s costumes nicely suggest, without too much insistence, the play’s original milieu, even when aspects of the setting become purposefully anachronistic.

Distinct New York accents add a further sense of place to the production, and perhaps provide a degree of exotic amusement for Californians. Jan Leslie Harding as Mrs. Zero employs the dialect to especially good effect during her long opening monologue on the theme of civilization and its discontents (particularly her discontented longing to attend the cinema immediately when new films are released rather than waiting until they reach cheaper local movie houses, as her husband prefers to do.)

Walter Belenky, Molly Fite, Liz Jenkins, Rufio Lerma, Paul Morgan Stetler, and Peter Wylie provide excellent support in a number of multiple roles.

Colbert S. Davis IV’s sound design uses some miking, but mainly to create a distinction between dialogue lines and the characters’ spoken thoughts. Original music by Cassia Streb enhances moods. And while a reprise of "Accentuate the Positive" at curtain call works nicely in reëmphasizing "The Adding Machine"’s true upbeat message, an equally apt choice could have been The Beatles’ 1965 "Nowhere Man," whose lyrics sum up Mr. Zero very well.

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