MatthewHampton

Matt, I think there might be a little more "roundness" to Mr. Zero than you give him credit for. Although he appeared to pay no attention to Daisy's conversation about killing herself and marrying him in the first half of the play, he certainly makes up for it when he shows us he was listening all along during their converstaion in the afterlife.

I took into consideration that Mr. Zero changed briefly while he was in the Elysian Fields with Daisy Devore.

But it isn't long before he reverts back to the loser he was previously. The change is not permanent, so I chose to disregard it.

On the other hand, I suppose you could technically consider that to be two changes.

Your right that souls go through endless eternities. I do believe that Mr.Zero is a round character. He may ignore Daisy in life, however the after life is where he makes up for the loss of time. "He state if I knew".

I'm willing to accept that Mr. Zero is probably our best shot if we're seeking a round character, but in my eyes, if he has any roundness, the curvature is incredibly slight.

I present another excerpt from the first page of the foreword (sic) Philip Moeller: "Before he wrote "The Adding Machine," Elmer Rice's name was associated with the type of theatrical production known as melodrama. Perhaps melodrama is best defined as the type of play in which the situation so to speak "creates" the people as over against that mightier form called tragedy in which the inevitable character of the dramatis personae creates the situation"

So is the plot driving the characters, rather than the other way around as maybe we've grown accustomed?

In my mind, Zero is the same imbecile he is at the end of the play as he is at the beginning. Rice goes to the trouble of creating a character most people wouldn't like, don't you think?

He has a rotten job, rotten home, rotten home life, boring friends, he spends all his time talking about what he'll do, but he never acts on it. Who would like a guy like that? When he's given everything he doesn't have: ideal life in the Elysian Fields with a woman who adores him, he instead, for (I think) ridiculous reasons, gives it up to punch keys on an adding machine.

As an aside, Zero has become sort of an adding machine himself, unable to forget the figures swirling around in his own head (see his courtroom soliloquy).

So we're confronted with seven scenes and we end up right back where we started with Zero (or maybe at zero). At the end of the story we learn his destiny, but he never changes even with the knowledge that at one time he was a mere monkey, or that he's bound to be a slave in each life, or that all he'll do in his next life is push some sort of counting machine with his toe.

In my mind, he's as useless as the men in Trifles, except Zero is our main character in this case. He's on stage in virtually every scene yet we learned a great deal more about Minnie Foster in a shorter period of time and she never appears on stage.

I didn't like this play because I'm still having some trouble trying to grasp a moral other than hey folks, life sure is futile and then you die.

I think I prefer Star Trek. Beam me up, Scotty.

Matt, you've brought up some excellent issues. Sometimes the protagonist fails to change. In that case, we the readers are supposed to change somehow.

It looks like this play has promopted you to articulate your values and defend them against Rice's nihilistic point of view.

On a purely personal level, I don't agree with Rice's depiction of the afterlife, and I wouldn't consider my job or my marriage to be anywhere near that bad. But in viewing an exaggerated, extreme vision of certain parts of modern life, we find ourselves facing a mirror a little more frequently than we'd like to admit.

Yes, that mirror is distorted and subjective, but that's sort of the point. This play is an example of expressionsitic drama, and expressionism is one way to represent reality.

Sure, Mr. Zero is a totally flat character, but I think that's important to the story. His complete blandness, his lack of any personality or color or humanity, symbolizes how the kind of life he lived - working a dead-end job all day and coming home to a loveless marriage at night - can kill a person's soul.

I liked the class discussion Feb. 9 regarding The Adding Machine.

I think some of the comments in class led me to see there was a bit more to Zero and the guys than I at first believed and believe that or not, I'm glad.

I was able to appreciate the ground-breaking approach of the play, given the year it was written. The material might have raised a few eyebrows.

But I suppose I was wrapped up exclusively in the flat aspects of Zero's character that I missed some of the play's more clever features. Kudos to Dr. Jerz for the line-type description. Very helpful.

And thanks to the rest of you for the comments you shared.

Thanks for that feedback, Matt. This is one of my favorite plays to teach, in part because it's not at all uncommon for students to change their minds after they listen to each other's reactions.

If you're used to reading novels, you are used to a level of psychological depth that you don't always find in the scripts, unless you've had experience figuring out just what the playwright's job is, and how the director and actors will add their own creative energies to the mix. Without the special effects and unusual staging techniques (the group chants, the internal monologues that Daisy and Zero speak aloud, the various supernatural settings and characters), there wouldn't be nearly as much reason to look at this play.