A three-story walk up with a ground floor exclusively dedicated to dumpsters, the Standard Toykraft Theater at 722 Metropolitan Ave is beyond grimy, yet still the New York Neo-Futurists have covered the space in paper-mache insects. A completely different atmosphere from their home venue (a black box under the KGB bar on E 4th Street in Manhattan), this Williamsburg space seats a far smaller audience (barely 20 people) in church pews, the stage consisting of a sectioned off portion of floor.

Soft Hydraulics consists of “five short plays exploring our relationships to puppetry and manipulation in the modern world”. The first short, KILLING TREES (“an explanation of wasted paper, shared resources and New York City wildlife”) starts the following two hours off with a humanitarian origami class, the Neo-Futurists displaying the power of music by folding paper creatures to an intense soundtrack, making everything feel intrinsically empowering albeit very strange and abstract. I experienced the second short, UNTITLED PARASOMNIA PROJECT (“a multimedia fantasia inspired by sleep disorders”) from behind a blindfold, as I was the audience member selected to play the insomniac. I was fed marshmallows, instructed to take a nap, and was briefly interviewed about my dreams. It was a surreal experience, quite anomalous as an example of one-on-one immersive entertainment. The audience participation continued into the third play, ONLINE DATING (“a window into the uncanny valley that is love on the internet”) where more audience members were selected to follow instructions from headphones while a sordid audio told the rest of the audience stories which turned their otherwise banal movements into erotic fantasies. The final short, REMOTE (“a personal take on the distant violence that is military technology”) ends the set on a surprisingly powerful note. Cara Francis, the only female Neo-Futurist in the cast, tells the story of a southern childhood filled with a gun loving father and a homely mother.

Like the Neo’s weekly performance of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (30 sketches performed in an hour), Soft Hydraulics is an eclectic blend of irrelevance, indirect political messages, cast members’ dealing with (assumedly true) personal trauma, and a general mod podge of human emotions. The Neos never seem to have any single message they wish to convey, so much as they put a little happiness back into the atmosphere. Soft Hydrualics is very consistent with their other work, albeit it is longer and subsequently more intense. With only 11 total shows, Soft Hydraulics is as fleeting as the skits themselves, but its message is lasting.