A week ago, I sat in the front row of ACT's Falls Theatre, waiting for The Adding Machine to start and thinking: Why did I agree to come to this? Theater in your mind is always so much better than theater as it is practiced. Even if there are good people in something, or the director's good, or the premise of the show sounds interesting, as soon as the lights go down the regret sets in. You are at least two and a half hours and an intermission away from the end. You have been trained by YouTube to not have that kind of attention span, and by the presidential election to think of real life as better theater than makeup and lights.

Then a couple representatives of the newly formed New Century Theatre Company came out to thank everyone for coming to the first night of their first show, and for donating money and time and sweat to making it all happen, after all they're just a bunch of excellent established Seattle actors/designers/directors who didn't feel there was a theater company in town doing good enough, gutsy enough stuff. The NCTC representatives seemed so sincere and so nice and so thankful that I felt for sure the play was going to suck. Just a feeling I had. Nevertheless, Amy Thone is in this thing, I thought, and everyone knows Amy Thone is a genius. Please God let Amy Thone be in a lot of it.

The NCTC representatives left the stage, everything went dark, and someone in the ensemble wheeled a big light onto the stage, and then slowly scanned the crowd with the bright, bright light, so that you were blinded for a second as the opening scene materialized. ("The company couldn't afford to pay union stagehands to adjust the overhead lights. So, for the first half of the play, designer Geoff Korff instructed the actors to wheel glaring bulbs around the stage by themselves," according to Brendan Kiley's column this week. "The effect is a revelation in chiaroscuro, turning the play into an eerie stage noir.") If the lighting's stark, the domestic scene that materialized after we were all blinded was, like, post-stark: stark plus time, stark plus dread and decay and resentment. There, center stage, with the most terrifying household implements you've ever seen, was Amy Thone, playing Mrs. Zero (how bout that name?), standing over her husband, Mr. Zero, played by Paul Morgan Stetler. This publicity photo doesn't do the tableau justice, but it helps:

Not only is Amy Thone in this thing, Amy Thone is the first actor to speak, and she doesn't stop for, like, 10 minutes—a seething, terrifying, hateful blast of bile, startling in its wickedness, astounding in its depth. The asshole who was moaning inwardly about not wanting to be here in the front row at a show that's bound to be horrible because so much Seattle theater is horrible is suddenly the luckiest motherfucker on the planet, because he has first-row seats to, well, the best thing of its kind he's ever been privileged to witness. This dark, smoldering, insanely well written 1923 play kicks you in the face immediately, and under the stylized, morbid, ruthless direction of John Langs, your face pretty much stays kicked in the whole way.

After his wife's wicked mockery of him, Mr. Zero goes off to work, adding numbers in a nameless firm, and the psychic landscape—the this-is-a-soulless-place-to-work message—is so well conveyed, so beautiful in a way, you feel like you're watching something totally new even though it's such an often-depicted idea. Mr. Zero has worked here for 25 years, his job has never changed, and he has never missed a day. Nevertheless, you know what's coming; Stetler's incredible body language, jumpy and striving, tells you everything. His boss tells him he's going to be replaced by an adding machine, a machine so easy to use a teenage girl could do it, and that he's no longer needed, that he's out of a job. The next scene is a party scene, full of shrieking 1920s women and garrulous 1920s men and a raven-like Mrs. Zero and a stuttering Mr. Zero—a Mr. Zero who hasn't told anyone, not even his wife, he's lost his job. This party scene is burned into my brain, in part because it's the point when the whole play pivots—a cop knocks on the door and hauls off Mr. Zero to jail, whereupon we learn that Mr. Zero has murdered his boss—and in part because of how it's staged, how it comes together and comes apart (best exit ever: Amy Thone gets on the floor and rolls upstage while pieces of the set are whisked around above her). Then comes a bristling, angry, racist, hysterical monologue of despair from Stetler; whether this monologue is better than Thone's earlier one is a debate you'll enjoy having with yourself later.

And that is only, like, the first 20 minutes of the show—a show that never lets up, and goes in directions you never would have expected out of the source material; a show that is very aware that you are a preoccupied person who doesn't want to sit through bullshit and that (not unrelated) you fear death more than you wish you did; a show that, in further evidence that this theater company knows what they're doing, has no intermission. It's one straight shot. With your face kicked in, as I mentioned. And two of the best live performances you are likely to ever see, as I believe I also mentioned. You haven't been to the theater in a year, or two, or ever? This is the show to see. Tickets are $25. Take a date. It's playing tonight at 8 pm, and tomorrow night at 8 pm, and on Sunday at 2 pm, as well as next weekend and the weekend after. But seriously, go tonight. Go now. You can get tickets here (by clicking the date you want in that little calendar to the right) or by calling 292-7676 or emailing service@acttheatre.org. Brendan Kiley's proper review—we wrote about the show and the company in two separate pieces this week—is here. Shows like this are why you live in a city. You are lucky, and not dead yet.