Reviews on Ada and the Engine in Chicago
Brookelyn Hébert/Photograph: Joe Mazza, Brave Lux Photography
"Ada and the Engine" attempts to do several impossible things at in one case and fails elegantly and enthusiastically at all of them. Lauren Gunderson's 2015 play is an endeavor to dramatize an undramatic life, to make technology sexier than it is, and to care for art and science (and maybe religion) not every bit differing and conflicting perspectives on reality but rather every bit aspects of the same sappy cosmic melodrama. The artistically ambitious and imaginative Artistic Home troupe puts in more effort than this talky, meandering work deserves, but in the finish this is one engine that only cannot.
The Ada in question is the real-life Ada Byron Lovelace, product of the misalliance betwixt the bright but wicked Romantic poet Lord Byron and the conventional Lady Anabella, who tells her daughter: "Your father poisoned every pond he passed." The domineering Anabella, concerned past the fact that Ada has more than a impact of her dad'due south fiery, headstrong temperament, steers her into marriage to the decent and respectable, if stodgy, Lord Lovelace. Simply in the meantime, Ada, a mathematical prodigy, has formed an intellectual bond with Charles Babbage, an inventor and visionary seeking to build the earth'south first mechanical computer, the "difference engine" of the play'southward championship. Burdened by ill health and benighted Victorian concepts of woman- and motherhood, Ada in her brusk and decorated life nevertheless managed to clear the bones laws of cybernetics and create the world's first computer program. She was of her time and ahead of it: a working model of Babbage's steam-powered analytical machine was finally congenital in 1991 by the London Science Museum, validating the pair'southward work 139 years afterward Ada's death.
With its marriage-driven plot mechanics and lengthy technical asides, "Ada and the Engine" comes off as the awkward love kid of Jane Austen and Bill Nye. the Science Guy. One of course sympathizes with Ada's powerful desire to be taken seriously every bit a scientist at a time when women were unwelcome in that earth. Simply a life given over to algorithms and polynomials is not necessarily one that will thrill theatergoers. Storywise, the most exciting thing that poor Ada Lovelace ever did was to die young, and so the second act is basically one drawn-out, Camille-like expiry scene. This segues into an afterlife come across with the father who abandoned her in a heaven that is somehow likewise the glowing inner workings of Babbage's device and the time to come digitized and networked globe we inhabit, here depicted equally a paradise of disembodied intellect and sanitized memories, free of the living world's pain.
"Machines cannot better us. Machines cannot love," protests the virtual Lord Byron (played by John LaFlamboy). Indeed, Ada's vision of the future, with its auto-made art and human being-replacing automation, has a pitch-black underside, at least in light of our own anxieties well-nigh bogus intelligence. Simply her father'south objections are swept bated in a play that ends up sentimentalizing technology and seeing only good things in a future dominated and defined past Babbage's "thinking loom with a heart similar a train."
Brookelyn Hébert plays amped-upwardly Ada, her every gesture strained and histrionic. In a play that could use a steady hand on the tiller, director Monica Payne keeps raising the show'south emotional level, until Hébert and John Mossman, as the sulky, always-aggrieved Babbage, egg each other on to chronic hysteria. The primary characters—including Ada'due south husband (Rich Holton) and mother (Carolyn Kruse)—register more than as plot devices than existent people. Babbage's friend Mary Somerville (Laura Coleman) has no purpose and nigh no personality, indicating just how sparse and first-draft the writing and storytelling are. Things are not improved past the bandage's uneven accents and the show's plastic tubular set, mayhap a nod to the innovative atomic number 26-and-glass Crystal Palace erected in London toward the cease of Ada's life every bit a monument to science and progress. But this glow-in-the-night stage structure is less inspiring than confining and distracting.
"Tonight we prove our poise," says Anabella to her rebellious Ada before an important matchmaking ball. But poise is just what this breathy, twitchy, overheated testify lacks. There'southward a expert play to be written nigh the birth of the figurer age, that late byproduct of the Industrial Revolution and the era'southward obsession with speed, ability and control. "Ada and the Engine," which has picayune movement, energy or driving purpose, is not it. (Hugh Iglarsh)
The Artistic Home, 1376 West Chiliad, (866)811-4111, theartistichome.org, $34. Through August four.
Source: https://www.newcitystage.com/2019/07/08/the-little-engine-that-couldnt-a-review-of-ada-and-the-engine-at-the-artistic-home/
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