Three Plays by Elmer Rice
by Elmer Rice

THE ADDING MACHINE The story focuses on Mr. Zero, an accountant at a large, faceless company.

After 25 years at his job, he discovers that he will be replaced by an adding machine.

In anger and pain, he snaps and kills his boss.

Mr. Zero is then tried for murder, is found guilty and hanged, only to wake up in a heaven-like setting known as the "Elysian Fields."

Mr. Zero then begins to operate an adding machine until the boss of the Elysian Fields, tells Zero that he is a waste of space and his soul is going to be sent back to the earth to be reused.

STREET SCENE An outstanding Broadway success and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this is a panorama of the comedy and tragedy of daily life played to the accompaniment of rumbling elevated trains and the tooting of whistles.

Though this remarkable play is primarily a slice of life in a poor neighborhood, it is held together by a strikingly dramatic plot which has to do with a theatrical scene shifter whose wife has been having a sordid affair with the milkman.

The husband returns unexpectedly and kills them both.

The incident serves chiefly to crystalize the viewpoint and very human reactions of the entire neighborhood.

This modern classic catches the varying moods of daily life as it is lived by millions in a large metropolis.

DREAM GIRL Tells of a delightful young woman who quite inefficiently runs a bookstore.

She is one of those charming but dreamy, over-imaginative young women whom the slightest suggestion may send off into the most extravagant daydreams.

In her own life she seeks at every opportunity to escape into a romantic world of unreality.

During a single day of her life, which shows the actual episodes of her existence, several successive incidents of her dreaming are amusingly dramatized.