You Are Number Six/Theatre

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of You Are Number Six in Theatre include:

  • Elmer Rice's stage play The Adding Machine, a surrealist fantasy written in the 1920s and still performed frequently, is about a hopeless non-entity who works in a corporation where all the employees have numbers for names. His name is Mister Zero, signifying that he is the lowliest person of all...not just in the company, but in the larger society as well.
  • Les Misérables is under Literature, but worth mentioning again.

"24601..."
"My name is Jean Valjean!"

  • Claude from the musical Hair at one point gives an emotional speech about how being drafted for duty in Vietnam has reduced him from a human being to just another number on a government filing system.
  • The song "Close Every Door" from Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat addresses Nazi concentration camps with "Just give me a number, instead of my name/ forget all about me, and let me decay..."