The Adding Machine

The Adding Machine is a play written by Elmer Rice (American Playwright who was born 1892) in 1923. Elmer Rice who was first trained in law and eventually abandoned that career to start addressing social justice issues. He was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and openly opposed the capitalist ruling class. The Adding Machine is a play that uses an expressionist style; expressionism is a school of thought that projects emotions and is not overly detailed or realistic. (Rice, ix)

In this essay, I will examine how The Adding Machine portrayed a relationship between labour and leisure using the lens of Raymond Williams’ Keywords. In the first section, I will use Zero’s job as an example of work and examine what it represents. In the

Features of the play show how Zero’s work is depicted in ways that it otherwise could not be. For example, when The Boss fires Zero the scene where “…suddenly it culminates in a terrific peal of thunder. For an instant there is a flash of red and then everything is plunged into blackness,” shows powerfully that Zero is feeling anguish and rage at the loss the past twenty-five years of his life (Rice, 30). If this book was written in a romanticized way, the raw feelings would be lost in the explanations, encompassing the intensity of thunder and the emotion portrayed by the color red is a feat that cannot easily be done. Another example of the expressive power of a play shows with what is not written, when the company of Mr. and Mrs. Zero arrive and begin talking it is clear that they are just generic people. If Rice went into full detail about who these folks were, it would have distracted from how mundane their conversation was. It expressed that workers are “always on” and that even in their leisure time they wear their work identities. If a text would explicitly state the conditions of overworking or always being on the audience could assume that it did not apply to them. A play can visually give the audience the same ideas as a text, but since it is being shown in less explicit terms the audience will implicitly understand the moral of the story without as much chance to refute