GableStage Whips out Adding Machine

George Schiavone

Meribeth Graham (left), Oscar Cheda, Jim Ballard, and Irene Adjan

Details

Adding Machine: Written by Joshua Schmidt and Jason Loewith. Directed by Joe Adler. With Irene Adjan, Jim Ballard, Oscar Cheda, Ken Clement, Meribeth Graham, Lisa Manulli, Stacy Schwartz, and Barry Tarralo. Through January 25. GableStage at The Biltmore, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables; 305-445-1119, www.gablestage.com

Related Content

• Obama's Wrong: Eliminate Food Aid Til the Economy's Back On Track
  April 5, 2013
• FIU Students Organizing Anti-Drone Protest
  April 5, 2013
• Suspected Bomb Addressed to President Obama Found in Sweetwater
  April 18, 2013
• 102-Year-Old Miami Woman Who Waited Hours to Vote Will Sit With Michelle Obama During SOTU
  February 12, 2013
• Rick Scott Suddenly Wants Barack Obama's Handouts
  March 29, 2013

More About

• Joe Adler
• Le Corbusier
• Elmer Rice
• Musicals
• Religious Concepts

Life might have seemed precisely this blinkered when Rice wrote the original play in the postwar industrial purgatory of 1923. Science, progress, the future — all roads must have seemed to lead to the same faceless gray cities, to the same kinds of mechanized alienation in which anything soft and organic was redundant. It's a Marxist critique, and one most grownups think we've outgrown. But it still has power as art. Let's hope we can respect it as such, despite our fear that Loewith and Schmidt's choice of source material won't prove prescient. Our fear is useless in any case. Canaries, after all, do not kill miners.