A dialogue-less performance featuring six of the most obscure plays by Nobel Laureate Eugene O’Neill, the New York Neo-Futurists’ The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill, Vol. 1: Early Plays/Lost Plays performed at The Kraine Theatre, is a detonation of creative energy and a rebellion against all conventional forms of theater. Starring six suspender-clad actors and a nameless narrator who reads the stage directions (thus speaking the only fully formed English in the play’s entirety), The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill is a horrible representation of the renowned playwright’s work as it includes only the stage directions from his one-acts A Wife for a Life (1913), The Web (1913), Bound East for Cardiff (1914), Before Breakfast (1916), and his full length plays Servitude (1914) and Now I Ask You (1916). The show is performed with hardly any costumes, props, or set, and the actors’ every movement is a response to the narrator’s reading of the stage directions. The plot is too absurd to be considered existent.

Adapted and directed by Christopher Loar, the performance deserves both awards for innovation and for its brilliantly awful adaptation of O’Neill’s work. While the 1916 performance of O’Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff with the Provincetown Players received much critical acclaim and praise for its dramatic reality, spirit of brooding compassion, and tragic inevitability, what remains of the once moving one-act without its dialogue, in the Neo-Futurist’s adaption,  can only be described as the ludicrous tale of an epileptic dancer and two manic sailors stranded at sea in a lifeboat. The actors’ literal interpretation of the stage directions exchange O’Neill’s signature tragedy and personal pessimism for unpredictable and hilarious outbursts of every emotion, curse, and use of the human body. Most theater companies would interpret the stage direction “the picture is an orgy of color” to mean a brightly colored painting, but in the Neo-Futurists’ adaption of Servitude this prompts a woman to erotically dance with her rainbow scarf behind an empty picture frame. Similarly, the response to “she turns crimson” is for the actress of concern to thrust her face into a bucket of rouge. At one point, a character must “get ready to crush her with the weight of his eloquence” and stands poised with slightly inflated cheeks.

In a world filled with over-analysis and deeper meanings in every nook and cranny, The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill is a breath of fresh air. In a way, it is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s groundbreaking 1957 play Act Without Words I: A Mime for One Player, in that the Neo-Futurists rely almost entirely on their bodies, not words, to express themselves. However, the fact that Beckett means to be profound while the Neo-Futurists only mean to be entertaining draws a very dark line between the two plays. With Eugene O’Neill the Neo-Futurists create both a wildly funny and refreshingly confident new play. Truly, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see anything quite like it.