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1.1 Introduction of the Playwright and the Play
Elmer Leopold Reizenstein, known as Elmer Rice, is one of the most important American playwrights of the twentieth century. He had a title, “Dean of Playwright”, which was quite appropriate for his contribution and devotion to American playwriting and staging. He was the first user of “flashback” on American stage. He created the first notable Expressionist play in America. He earned a Pulitzer Prize in his first venture into Naturalism. His career spanned more than half a century, covering a revolutionary period of both American literature and society. No other playwright wrote so prolifically nor with such versatility and at the same time enjoyed so high a reputation. For sheer longevity and productivity Elmer Rice deserved the appellation of dean of American playwright.
Rice’s story began on September 28, 1892, when he was born in New York City. Always on the edge of poverty, Rice worked in a relative’s law firm at a young age and studied hard to get a better educational background. Finally he graduated from New York Law School and passed the bar examination. But these years of study and practice made it clear for Rice that he did not want to practice law. He began to read a lot instead and tried to write plays.
Elmer Rice’s first play was called “A Defection from Grace”, which came from the inspiration of two friends who wrote short plays. This work was for a competition and they won second prize. Though no money, the young writer was encouraged. And then came his first overnight success—On Trial in 1914. The play was a blockbuster which ran for 365 performances, and then went on the road to play in numerous cities in the United States, Europe, South Africa, and the Far East. Eventually, it was made into a film. On Trail is a courtroom melodrama with eleven scenes. The time of the action covers the two days of the trial, with flashbacks. It is the first flashback user on American stage and a two-platform stage had to be developed in order to shift scenes rapidly from one to another.
Rice spent the following several years to make an important decision—the aim of his play. He believed “that social evils are the accumulation of inpidual acts of malice, and that social betterment can be achieved only through inpidual affirmation and creativeness. Since to be creative, one must be free, I was determined to speak out for freedom, both in my work and by whatever other means were available.”(Frank Durham, 1970:33) Since he made this decision around 1916, he has never really wavered throughout his life. This explains much about the content and tone of many of his subsequent plays.
In the 1920’s, Rice was at his best. It was during this period that his two greatest plays were produced. The Adding Machine and Street Scene are at least minor classics of the American theater. The former was one of the best American expressionist plays as regarded by many critics, and the latter was a Pulitzer winner for its precedent-shattering attempt to involve several stories in a single play.
The Adding Machine tells the pathetic story of Mr. Zero who works attentively and assiduously for 25 years as an accountant in a large, faceless company, but is suddenly fired for the replacement of workers by the adding machine. In anger and despair, he kills the boss and thus is found guilty, executed and goes into afterlife, where he still cannot escape his destiny of operating a machine as a slave, and finally is sent back to earth to repeat his tragedy all over again. In this play, the author creates a nightmarish, distorted world where inpiduals have not only lost their dignity but their identity, a world where machines dominate and depersonalize human beings to the raw material and the product of a mechanized society (Charles Thorpe, 2009:266).
Always as a vanguard of different spirits and skills, in this play Rice shows a creative exploitation of expressionist techniques. Expressionism is a technique aiming at being both objective and subjective by making inner experience concrete, which means expressionists retain the surface reality but distort it radically for emotional effect. The Adding Machine, regarded as the best full-length expressionistic play by an American dramatist, exemplifies this technique in numerous ways, featured by the characters’ stream-of-consciousness monologues, the use of outward symbols, and the employment of sound effects, strangely distorted settings, and mechanical devices.