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Seeing “Ada and the Engine” is like watching a ballet, only the dancers are ideas, spiraling around the stage in ever more complex formations. It is a truly remarkable theatrical experience, and one with a strong appeal for Silicon Valley types.
Any notion that this is going to be a standard tale of computer pioneers meets an immediate left turn when our titular Ada is scolded for reading a poem written by her father: “She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies…”
Yes. Ada’s father is Lord Byron. What becomes immediately apparent is that the fear of the widow Byron (Maya Capur) that her daughter might be swept into her late husband’s darkly poetic streak is utterly unfounded. Although her heart leans poetic, Ada’s brain is filled to the brim with math. When she discusses anything arithmetical, she lights up like a Christmas tree.
As the play opens, 18-year-old Ada (Angel Lin) is uncomfortably dolled up, awaiting introductions to potential husbands at a soiree. In a rather binary fashion, she is immediately faced with two candidates: the young, attractive Lord Lovelace (Joshua Bao) and the older, brilliant Charles Babbage (David Boyll). The meeting with the lord is a sequence of awkward pauses. The introduction to Babbage is a series of intellectual pyrotechnics. Babbage is the inventor of the Difference Engine, a proto-computer designed to perform the four basic mathematical functions. Ada seems to know more about the engine than the man who invented it, and Babbage can only stand by as Ada pours out her ideas for ever-more-complex applications.
Lauren Gunderson’s script is an intriguing fugue of themes. Having been burned by her philandering meteorite of a husband, Lady Byron instructs her daughter in the art of the fear-driven life. Sadly, this approach is confirmed at every turn by the precarious position of women in 19th-century society — especially a woman with a scandalous father and an eccentric devotion to science.
Although she marries Lord Lovelace, Ada’s most fascinating relationship is her collaboration with Babbage. In a Salieri/Mozart fashion, he is the only one who’s qualified to understand how truly brilliant she is. Trading on her family name, Babbage arranges for Ada to translate and publish an article on his second machine, the Analytical Engine. Ada turns it to her advantage by adding to several explanatory notes, introducing new ideas that include what is now considered the first example of a published computer program.
The shining sun of the production is Angel Lin, who not only creates a wholly endearing character but also fires out long runs of scientific verbiage that are dazzling in their virtuosity. The audience develops a protective feeling toward her, painfully aware of all the societal walls standing in her way.
Boyll’s performance of Babbage is charming and understated. Their interplay — notably a fiery argument at the start of Act Two — evokes shadows of Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn in “My Fair Lady,” which is, funnily enough, The Pear’s next production. The constantly fluctuating mix of friendship, science and affection is endlessly involving.
The play also has that valuable quality of not being predictable. Lord Lovelace could be expected to be madly jealous about his wife’s odd friendship, but instead seems relieved that someone’s around who can talk with her on this elevated level. Joshua Bao lends Lovelace a likeable, everyman quality.
Lord Byron himself appears in a dream sequence, played in a leprechaun fashion by Doy Charnsupharindr. Ada uses these moments to talk about computers creating music, which seems very close to our current AI moment. Her imaginings of the binary eureka-point comes with artful work by lighting designer Edward Hunter. The set is a simple two-level affair, but decorated in a lower pocket by paraphernalia from our more recent computer history, like an archaeological dig from the future.
The ensemble work under director Miller Liberatore is superb, including a running motif in which characters recite their letters to each other while writing in the air. The opening night audience included representatives from the nearby Computer History Museum, and I noticed the techies in the audience laughed at quite a few lines that the rest of us didn’t catch. (Ada’s idea of mimicking looms through the use of punch cards drew an especially strong response.) In a theater just south of the Google campus, such tech-friendly content is quite a cherry on top of the sundae.
“Ada and The Engine” runs through Dec. 7 at The Pear Theatre, 1110 La Avenida, Suite A, Mountain View. $43-$45. 650-254-1148 or thepear.org
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