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Elmer Rice was not only an innovative playwright famous for his technical dexterity but a dedicated guider with a high expectation of American theatre. He not only introduced fresh ideologies and techniques to American stage, but also helped the unknown groups and theatres to insist on producing plays of high-quality. He contributed both financial support and advice to the Group Theatre, the Theatre Union, and the Theatre Alliance. On the whole, the purpose of these groups was to produce plays of social significance, to make more important the contribution of creative playwrights, directors, actors, and others involved in putting on plays, and generally to improve the quality of American drama.
1.2 Literature Review
Elmer Rice is a “tentative precursor of social-protest drama”, who criticizes the mechanization and dehumanization of the society by ruthlessly revealing the miserable lives of people at the bottom. He is also an innovator who first, on the American stage, used flashback in On Trail, and expressionism in The Adding Machine. Thus, the author, his plays and his writing techniques have been the subjects of intense research for several decades by scholars and experts from both home and abroad.
In the book Elmer Rice, Frank Durham gave a full account of the play The Adding Machine, including the background, the content, and the techniques of the play as well as the response of the public. In this book the author mentioned that Elmer Rice finished this play nearly at one sitting because it came to him as a mysterious illumination. Rice recalled in his autobiography that this play appeared just all of a sudden, “as though a switch had been turned or a curtain rose”. Every detail occurred naturally and he finished writing this play in only 17 days. In 1920s, America was on its way up of being more and more industrialized. Mass production and an increasingly wide use of machines would inevitably cause a large-scale unemployment of the workers. Thus, “in 1923, it was the fashion to deplore the ugliness and moral decay of the machine age.” (Frank Durham, 1970:51) Rice’s criticism of society in The Adding Machine was greatly influenced by the current trend of self-criticism in America. Novelists and dramatists were concerned with the moral and cultural values of American society but they had not realized that the ultimate villain was capitalism until the spreading influence of Communism in the 1930s.
Similarly, Charles Thorpe (2009) also focused on the depersonalizing features of workers’ daily lives under capitalism. He mainly compared the distorted mechanized society of capitalism with the Communist theory of Karl Marx. The world described by Elmer Rice was both out of control because people became the slave, instead of the master, of machines, and at the same time over-controlled since there were lots of corrupted rules, regulations and restrictions. Though Rice lamented the status of the workers who was wage slaves at the mercy of the exploiters, one cannot assume that Rice was a Communist. He was merely pointing out the necessity of social reform. In The Adding Machine, the protagonist was a white-collar worker because Rice was quite familiar with such office work for his father used to be an office clerk. Thus, the theme of “routinization and mechanization of white-collar labor speaks powerfully to contemporary trends” as the advances in science and technology increasingly homogenize people in modern society.
In Utopian Thought in British and American Literature, Niu Hongying focuses on the utopian thought in representing literature works, or utopian literature. The Adding Machine is not a utopian work strictly speaking, but Rice is more of a utopian and his utopian thought can be easily seen in this work. Instead of originating with More’s Utopia, utopian fiction, as a literary genre, already existed in Hellenistic times. Meaning a “non-existing good place”, utopia has long been representing the hope of human beings for an ideal society, which dated back to the description of the Eden Garden in the Old Testament and Plato’s Republic. Except for the similar external communities, the state of utopian consciousness within is also an important element of Western utopian thought, which includes, among others, the ideas of universal brotherhood and the noble savage. In the later part of The Adding Machine, the Elysian Fields represents a utopian society and the residents there share common characters with the noble savage.