Tennessee Shakespeare Company to Present the Regional Premiere of ADA AND THE ENGINE

Tennessee Shakespeare Company returns prolific playwright Lauren Gunderson (2019's Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley) to its Owen and Margaret Wellford Tabor Stage for the regional premiere of her new historical romance of Byronesque poetry and scientific invention: Ada and the Engine.

The first production on the indoor Tabor Stage of TSC's 14th performance season, Ada and the Engine, directed by Producing Artistic Director Dan McCleary, runs November 11-21 and is generously sponsored by The Sims Family Charitable Trust.

Set between 1835-1852 (and beyond), Ada and the Engine brings to the stage historical figures Ada Byron Lovelace, her parents Lord Byron and Annabella Byron, her husband Lord Lovelace, and the esteemed inventor Charles Babbage. What is unknown of their actual dialogue and relationships is here imagined by Gunderson into a play of imaginative theatricality, time travel, dance, music, and possibility. At the center of the narrative is the brilliant young woman who invented computer programming.

In Victorian London, the young mathematician Ada Byron embodies a confluence of poetry, science, music, and a musical vision for future generations that she can't quite articulate. Yet. The poetry is that of her departed father: Lord Byron.

To ensure Ada has no relationship to her irresponsible father or his scandalous writing, her mother focuses Ada's studies strictly on "maths" and her future strictly on marriage to Lord Lovelace. The Byron name carries damage and ill repute. But Ada's heart will not be denied. Nor will her mind.

The precocious youngster eyes the creative potential of the clanking Difference Machine and Analytic Engine designed by scholar and much-older friend Charles Babbage. While he may never see his invention of the massive computer come to life, Ada senses a musicality in the machine that could change the world. But for a woman in this time, will her fantastical ideas and curious relationship with Babbage overwhelm her own mortality?

In Gunderson's play, it may require an awakening in Ada's unconscious world -- and a song with an unlikely familial spirit.

McCleary directs a cast that introduces actor/dancer Rachel Cendrick as Ada, and features TSC company members Jabril Bey as Charles Babbage, Lauren Gunn (TSC's Romeo and Juliet, Henry VI, Miss Bennet) as Anabella Byron and Mary Sommerville, and Nicolas Dureaux Picou (TSC's Romeo and Juliet, Henry VI, As You Like It, Macbeth) as Lord Lovelace and Lord Byron.

The production's original music is composed and played by The Kilbanes.

"We have had our eye on Lauren Gunderson's new play for over a year," says McCleary. "I appreciate her scholarship, which she insists on being embraced by the modern. That occurs in most of her writing, which I admire. Here, she gives us intriguing, powerful women, who must have been terribly creative to get their voices heard between 1835 to 1852 in London. And I confess that I had no idea Ada Byron Lovelace was the mother of binary code invention. But more than this, it is her courage and unique intellectual capacity to marry math/science to poetry/music that is electric. On stage, we get to explore history with modern invention, dance, and visual projections that we imagine bursting forth from Ada's mind as she envisions the future (our present day) and her heart as she navigates a social world that does not permit her total independence.

"This is a show unlike anything else our audiences have seen on the Tabor Stage - wildly theatrical with a lot of fun production elements."

The production design team includes Allison White (costume designer), Jeremy Allen Fisher (scenic/lighting designer), Melanie Mulder (properties designer), Burkett Horrigan (stage manager), Nathan Greene (sound and video programmer), P.J. Townsend (assistant stage manager), and James Baker (assistant technical director).

Ada and the Engine is presented by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc., New York.

For more information visit: www.tnshakespeare.org

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