Such are the life and afterlife of one Mr. Zero in Elmer Rice’s classic play The Adding Machine (1923), re-imagined and staged at the La Jolla Playhouse. The universe it depicts is one many people can relate to at some points in their lives. The randomness and unfairness of life, the way human beings treat each other without really connecting, the way our technology can dehumanize us in the ever-going pursuit of a technologically inspired utopia. And Director Daniel Aukin and his team bring this universe to us with loads of creativity and dark humor.

The show takes place in the new, state-of-the-art Potiker Theatre, built with all sorts of fun toys that allow the designers to adjust the seating arrangements as well as the smooth, mechanized raising and dropping of set pieces from above and below. And they make use of all of it here. For this production, they’ve turned the Potiker into a theatre-in-the-round so that we are all sitting around Andrew Lieberman’s set – a mostly sterile and modern-looking living room with chairs in sunken holes. This transforms into an office space when the floor rises up to become the office ceiling, the holes that were in the floor becoming holes through which office lamps descend. Before it’s over, the set will take us to heaven and hell as well. Special mention must also be made of the sound design by Colbert S. Davis IV that includes the background office hum that we hear at Mr. Zero’s workplace whenever we aren’t listening to the inner voice of the office workers, the pouring of an endless glass of wine by Mr. Zero’s depressed wife (and the same long sound as she polishes off that glass of wine), and by the gradually rising pitch of a tinnitus-like noise that begins as Mr. Zero realizes that his boss is firing him and build as we experience his growing rage and descent into madness.