“She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies,” read the first lines of Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty” — lines that double as the first lines to Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s newest production, Ada and the Engine, which revolves around Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s forgotten daughter.
“What gives Ada life is the heartbeat of her father’s literature,” says Dan McCleary, director of the show. “She never actually met him. Her mother was intent on her never being like her father and forced her into a life of science and mathematics. And that’s not where women go at this time in London, but Ada is adept at it — more than adept.” As such, Ada went on to coming up with binary coding — those zeros and ones that are the foundation of modern technology.
Because of her continued role in our technology two centuries later, the play is a “fantastical marriage between the historical and the modern, and so it’s a production unlike any we’ve done before. Audiences will get a sense of true-fact history on stage, but also you’ll see the modernity in the costumes, in the lighting projections, on the set, in Edison bulbs on stage, and in the music. There’s a lot of modern dancing in the piece. There’re musical pieces that audiences will have heard and original music. … There’s even a bit of time travel where Ada ultimately meets her father and sees the past, present, and future.”
Like her father, Ada was interested in poetic, rhythmic patterns, which allowed her to recognize the patterns of binary coding. In that way, McCleary says, “The show becomes a beautiful, artistic argument for ensuring that reading fiction, reading poetry, and studying the humanities should be as central to every child’s education as science and math.”
Ada and the Engine, Tennessee Shakespeare Company, 7950 Trinity, Opening November 11th, 7:30 p.m., $20-$35.