Artistic Home Presents ADA AND THE ENGINE Review

Before the action starts as you take your seat around a jungle gym like set you too might imagine all the action will be unfolding in a garden gazebo. For those who have similarly logged a lot of time in Southeast Asia, it may remind of how the line between inside and outside in those warmer climes is newly vague. This writer suggests that it will be good to remember that first impression at the play’s end, when scenic designer Eleanor Kahn and Lighting Designer Cat Wilson transform this frame of contiguous trapezoidal prizms into a dynamic sculptural representation of lead character Ada Lovelace née Byron’s imagination on fire.

As the lights come on in this gazebo-like structure, we meet a somewhat petulant Ada Byron Lovelace (Brookelyn Hebert) trying to conceal a book of her late father’s poetry from her scolding mother (Lady Anabella Byron, played by Carolyn Kruse). We might at first think we are watching a theatrical interpretation of a Jane Austen novel instead of a work by modern day playwright Laura Gunderson. As in an Austen novel, poor Ada’s marriage prospects and the need to marry up for status is all consuming—at least for her mother. Ada might be entirely marriageable if not for being the offshoot of Lord Byron, the famed poet also known back in his day for libertine ways. In fact, her spurned mother has been so determined to remove all predisposition to the passionate nature of Ada’s father in her daughter’s person that she had steered Ada to mathematics- -the most un-poetry thing there is, or so her mother thinks.

As fate would have it, Lady Byron’s meticulous planning began to be undone on this very day of Ada’s launch in society. When Ada meets Charles Babbage (John Mossman), mathematician and inventor of a computing machine model, we see what groupie looked like in the Victorian era. Maybe because he’s an older man and Ada never had a Dad, maybe because the passion of a firebrand poet was her birthright, or maybe because she just loves mathematical puzzles—she is drawn to him with super-magnet force. The play then continues to recount their relationship and through that lens also shines a light on the first glimmers of what morphed into the computer age that now defines our time.

As one might predict, there is the love triangle tension between Babbage, Ada and her husband Lord Lovelace (Rich Holton). But actually, the dynamics are closer to the contiguous trapezoidal prism-like sculpture of the set—with the missing father Lord Byron (John La Flamboy), Ada’s math tutor and Babbage’s friend Mary Somerville (Laura Coleman), Lady Byron all giving their good tugs on the triangle to make it into a geometric form of another sort. It’s mathematics that is in many ways the romantic lead that stirs and stirs the protagonists’ passions and--- (SPOILER ALERT!) --- playwright Gunderson even pens lines that blur distinctions between algorithms and orgasms that deserve a place in the pantheon of memorable sex allusions next to “I’ll have what she’s having” from When Harry Met Sally.

Gunderson’s script is informed by a feminist pen-- starting with the very choice of topic. STEM teachers and school leaders trying to get more girls into the sciences would do well to schedule field trips to see this play. This reviewer might have wanted the script to end sooner, but imagines others will like the scenes of fantasy when Lord Byron appears towards the end to be the best. Sticklers who know the details of computing history might get stuck on a detail or two, but Gunderson’s bigger point perhaps is in making intellectual passions compelling.