Angel Lin and David Boyll Photo by Mikenzie Gilbert

In Ada and the Engine, now in production at The Pear Theatre under the direction of Miller Liberatore, the facts concerning Babbage's innovations and Ada Lovelace's contributions are accurate history. Playwright Lauren Gunderson has crafted plausible exchanges between those two as well as their relationships with Ada's mother, Lady Anabella Byron, and others. The result is an engrossing biography that spans time in more than one dimension.

One surprise to some is Ada's lineage. She was the only legitimate child of George Gordon Lord Byron, the esteemed Romantic poet so often linked in the triumvirate of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Ada's mother was Anabella, who was distinguished as a philanthropist, educational reformer, and abolitionist. She is also said to be the only woman that Byron didn't charm, and he abandoned her for Greece only a month after Ada's birth. Ada would never know her father, and as one aspect of Anabella's severe treatment, Ada wasn't even shown an image of him until she was an adult.

Because of Lord Byron's capriciousness and mental illness, Anabella forced Ada away from artistic pursuits and into mathematics, which turned out to be a fortuitous fit. The mother's only goal in the play is depicted as wanting Ada to marry into a title, but enjoining her to attend one of Babbage's soirees had the opposite effect. Instead, she found an outlet for her prodigious mathematical talent as Babbage's protégé and in many ways became his equal. Later, as they looked to establishing a firm to promote the unrealized engine, Ada even proposed herself as the overall boss.

Angel Lin portrays Ada, who was sickly from youth and had a troubled relationship with her mother. Lin's portrayal is of a young woman who is independent yet cheery–cheered by being able to pursue mathematics. Yet the gravity of her father pulls her. In reading his poetry, she taps her heart to the rhythm of the syllables and even embraces the fusion of technology and arts by deeming Babbage's engine to have a beating metal heart.

Lord Byron had died at age 36, and anticipating Ada's own brief existence, Lin speaks rapid-fire and enthusiastically as if the character is trying to cram as much into life as she can. Urgency and initiative drive her. She distinguishes herself by translating a scholarly paper in mathematics from Italian and adding notations that exceed the length of the paper. Her insights into the engine's possibilities lead her to conceptualize computing functions well beyond what Babbage had considered. Ada derived that any symbols could be coded into zeros and ones, her favorite being musical notation. The binomial system applied to computer data starting a century later codes as she conceived.

Although Ada and Babbage had disagreements on concepts and development, only once was their personal and professional relationship almost fractured. That resulted from a resolute Babbage wanting to publicly point fingers at the government for not funding the development of the engine. Otherwise, David Boyll's apt depiction is of an affable, sometimes bumbling, but socially progressive man, though in some cases, he did wish to share less credit than he should.

Maya Kapur's Anabella is adeptly played as sour and uncompromising. One might be a bit surprised that Byron would have married someone of that sort, but perhaps his lack of discipline and ultimate betrayal of her contributed to her unpleasantness.

Like any parlor-room drama, the success of Ada and the Engine relies on a taut narrative and good acting to succeed, and so it does. The one plotline element that does feel a little clumsy is the add-on closing scene in which the deceased Ada and her father can finally commune in the afterworld.

One acting issue of note is that several actors do not project their voices well, and from the more distant seats, some are too faint to be consistently understandable. And while Kapur and Boyll use English accents, Lin as Ada does not. Taken as a demonstration of acting, her characterization is very sound, and she does show breadth of emotion when appropriate. Yet, her vocal quality, accent, and gesticulation contradict the Englishness of her character. To some patrons, like my wife, that may not matter. And in the final analysis, Angel Lin and the play deliver a worthy result.

Ada and the Engine runs through December 7, 2025, at The Pear Theatre, 1110 La Avenida, Mountain View CA. For tickets and information, please visit www.thepear.org.