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Theater

Zero at the bone

The physical production, too, reflects the grotesquerie of the world Rice conjured back at the dawn of the machine age, in a bigoted, profit-driven America. Paul Melone directs the piece as if it were a march, its characters jumping out of lockstep to deliver arias of prim yearning or burning ire. The dominant color of Jeff Adelberg’s lighting-design palette is lurid red, and Susan Zeeman Rogers’s clever set design includes not just swirling numbers and a billowing purgatory but a horizontal trough through which trudges a mired workforce — not to mention that assembly line of returning souls looking for all the world as if they were about to punch a time clock.