Ada and the Engine

Last week I went to see Lauren Gunderson's play Ada and the Engine in Fort Worth. It's about Ada Lovelace making a name for herself while living in the shadow of her famous father Lord Byron. It's very imaginative, funny, dramatic, entertaining, and even musical. I liked it, with some reservations.

In the beginning, Ada is dominated by her mother Annabella, who thinks that Ada has inherited her father's reckless and sinful passions. Apparently Ada tried to elope with her mathematics tutor in the past, and she still likes to read Lord Byron's poetry. Annabella actually rips out pages in the book while lecturing Ada not to emulate her father. Ada eventually marries the wealthy Lord Lovelace, but her heart is truly captivated by Charles Babbage's Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, proto-computers that were not fully built in his lifetime. The play casts their relationship as an unconsummated romantic love, rather than an intellectual affinity between a mentor and his protege. In fact, the whole thing becomes a love triangle when Ada's husband Lord Lovelace objects to her friendship with Babbage. He eventually relents when Ada's illness (possibly post-partum depression) is relieved by Babbage's letters, which excite her and cheer her up about technological possibilities.

SPOILERS

I kind of wish the play had left Ada and Charles as platonic soulmates, if only to spite Ada's mother who keeps talking about Ada's sinfulness and wants her to confess. (If Wikipedia can be trusted, Ada's mother talks her into a deathbed religious conversion. It also says that Ada died of uterine cancer.) The play shows her taking laudanum for her pain, resulting in delirious fantasies about her being married to Charles and having kids with him.

I did enjoy much of the play's witty dialogue, and enthusiastic celebration of science and invention, but I didn't like her mother being such a shrewish villain. I mean, she did have grievances against Lord Byron, and I'm less forgiving of the whole "he's a genius, so it's fine for him to be an asshole, deadbeat dad, etc." There's also a fantasy sequence where, because Ada asked to be buried next to her father, she meets him in the afterlife and also creates music out of binary code, imagining the current computer age. It's visually striking and beautiful, but to me it feels too much like Ada is still living in the shadow of her father. Like, why does he get credit for her intellectual genius, if it's her mother, also a mathematician, who decided to educate Ada in math?

Anyway, it was a good night out, and then I found this cool BBC video documentary called Calculating Ada from 2015, that puts Ada's contributions into context within computing history.