Oct 16, 2009  |  By: Patrick Folliard  | COMMENTS     

Gay writer and director Jason Loewith describes “Adding Machine: A Musical” as the result of a 12-year crush.

Admittedly “woefully ignorant” about opera at the time, Loewith’s first boyfriend was the administrator of an opera company in Los Angeles, so he found himself attending lots of productions. A turning point came with Kurt Wiell’s “Street Scene,” based on Elmer Rice’s play about the sad lives of ordinary people. A light bulb went on.

“I thought to myself, ‘Finally, this is the kind of opera I can see myself doing,’” Loewith says during an interview at Studio Theatre where his musical chamber work is making its D.C. area premier.

In search of source material prime for adaptation, Loewith began reading everything by Rice, including his 1923 expressionistic classic “The Adding Machine.” A story about Mr. Zero, an accounting functionary who learns that after 25 years of faithful service, he’s to be replaced by a machine. In response, he murders his boss. Zero is tried, executed and his soul goes on to the Elysian Fields. 

“The first four pages of Rice’s play is Mrs. Zero haranguing her husband about his many inadequacies,” says Loewith, 41. “Immediately I recognized her monologue as an aria, and knew I could make an opera out of this. I was transfixed.”

Beginning in the late ’90s, Loewith began working on the musical’s libretto and looking in earnest for backers and a collaborative composer in L.A. and New York City; for a time, his efforts proved futile. But in 2003 things changed: Loewith had become the successful artistic director of Next Theatre Company in Chicago and when the chance came to commission a musical, he suggested his own project. Soon after he hired young, talented composer Joshua Schmidt to do the score and collaborate on the lyrics and book.

“Josh is a well-studied musician,” Loewith says. “He’s filled the score with sounds from the modernists, Tin Pan Allley and gospel. His great achievement is composing a score that reflects varied influences, but is not pastiche. It feels completely unified. He accomplishes this by taking a few key melodies and tracking them through the entire piece in different forms. It’s incredible.”

Originally directed by David Cromer, the Chicago production was a critical and commercial hit. The show moved to off-Broadway where it was equally well received.

“Nothing against Chicago,” says Loewith, a Connecticut native, “But the New York City success was a bigger deal, just crazy and so unexpected.”

Throughout the process of adapting Rice’s masterpiece to music, Loewith immersed himself in 1920s culture, a period he loves, listening to Irving Berlin and George Gershwin and watching Fritz Lang’s silent classic “Metropolis” repeatedly. 

“That era was a time of cultural and artistic ferment in this country, and that’s part of what enabled Rice to write what was ultimately an experiment for him. After ‘Adding Machine,” he never returned to expressionism.”

Interestingly, the work portrays some darker moments not always associated with the roaring ’20s. 

“Rice was interested in capitalism’s dehumanization of the worker,” Loewith says. “Different aspects of the piece are fantastically relevant at different times. When I began writing, it was post 9-11 and the country was turning inward, xenophobia was on the rise. Zero represents those things. Today’s insecure economy is definitely reflected in the show too.”

Studio’s “Adding Machine” (featuring Broadway vet David Benoit as Mr. Zero) marks Loewith’s first time directing the 90-minute operatic piece.

“It’s an emotional ride — sad, darkly funny, fast-paced,” he says. “I want to retain many elements of the original production while embracing Studio’s Stage 4’s raw aesthetic.”

Last year Loewith relocated from Chicago to D.C. to work as executive director at the National New Play Network.

“I’m slowly learning the local theater scene,” he says. “Directing ‘Adding Machine’ at Studio has been a great opportunity to get to know it a lot better.”

‘4.48 Psychosis’

The most disturbing thing about lesbian playwright Sarah Kane’s intense “4.48 Psychosis” is that she wrote it knowing she wouldn’t make it to opening night. 

Kane, a brilliant writer and deeply depressed woman, was just 28 when she committed suicide in 1999, shortly after completing the insightful hour-long inner monologue but a year prior to its London premier.         

And now the new theater collective, Factory 449, has brought its own take on the British playwright’s last work to the Warehouse on 7^th Street, N.W. Staged by gay director and company co-artistic director John Moletress, this production — a remount of the Factory’s award-winning Capital Fringe entry — bodes well for the group’s future.

Kane’s riveting exploration of the anger, sadness and myriad feelings that go with severe clinical depression, isn’t easy to produce. Written with neither stage directions nor character delineations, and only suggested dialogue, it takes an imaginative director to pull it off — Moletress more than rises to the challenge.

The excellent 10-person cast, lead ...