NYNEOS

Outside of their content, most theater productions are predictable. The thick, wine-red curtain emits enormous quantities of dust, illuminated by glaring spotlights and glittering costumes. Stage managers hide the cast behind smoke and mirrors; stiff, immaculately applied makeup and a delicately structured set and plot. The performers have a purpose: to provide audience members with an escape from reality by immersing them in a more thrilling realm of time and space. Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (TML), created in 1988 Chicago by Greg Allen, is an attempt to treat theater as a blunt, satirical, and heartbreaking interpretation of the here and now. The performers are themselves, genuine and blatantly honest.

The technical goal of the show is to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes, as long as the audience cooperates enthusiastically and no one pulls the fire alarm. Upon entering the dark, intimate Kraine Theater on 4th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, audience members must pay $12 plus the number on a rolled die. A man sitting on the ground, wearing massive blue headphones, yells a question. “Hi, What’s Your Name?!” I respond, and he writes ‘urban intrepid’ on a blank nametag. My friend is frustrated by the ambiguity of her moniker, ‘planning on it’, for the rest of the evening. Fold the playbill in half, and you’ve got a menu of skits to choose from. At the end of each skit, which range from ten seconds to three minutes, the cast yells “Curtain!” and the audience yells out the number of the play they wish to see.

Unless you have narcolepsy, it’s practically impossible to nod off during the show, when you are barraged by rainbow glitter, blasting pop music and clothing thrown this way and that. I had expected the skit titled “Fair Trade” to be a lecture on supporting sustainable, community-based agriculture. Instead, a woman stripped down to her bra, pointed to a man in the audience, and exchanged shirts with him. The trade continued for 5 minutes. The other skits incorporate the same revolutionary treatment of the performer-audience relationship. In ‘Dirty Laundry Aired Fondly’, an audience member selects an unusual piece of clothing from a hamper of the cast’s dirty laundry, and that cast member tells the story of why it is unique.

A descendant of the Italian Futurism movement of the early 20th century, TML continues the mission of renouncing traditional, soul-sucking, necrophilic “imitation art”, the product of cerebral laziness. The manifesto of the Italian Futurists incorporates a pledge to “elevate all attempts at originality, however daring, however violent.” The speed and modernity Futurists rejoiced in is evident in the fast-paced demand for audience interaction, the agility with which an audience member must adapt to the demands of the TML performance. From the political turbulence of the 1980s comes the informal, “starving artist” format of the theater. The Neo-Futurists pride their show on its role as a “living newspaper”, evident in the play “New Jersey Conga Line”, which mocked Gov. Chris Christie’s bridge scandal.

Some skits are witty. ‘How to ruin Dr. Seuss’ satirizes the modern obsession with organic, all-natural food. It commences with a cast member asking, “Do you like green eggs and ham?” The other performer responds, ‘it depends’…….. Why are the eggs green? Is it mold? Mold causes cancer. Were the chickens free-range? What about the ham? Is it domestic?

The recurring themes of the plays are honesty and freedom from inhibition. They mock, challenge, and dramatize, touching on such subjects as race stereotypes (‘Every Single Word Spoken By a Person of Color in the Julia Louis-Dreyfus Comedy Enough Said as Performed by the Only Neo-Futurist of Color in Tonight’s Show, with Original Accents from the Motion Picture’), sex scandals (‘We still care about Monica’), female self-esteem (‘Pretty, Funny’) and the traditional role of theater itself.  While most performers convey their character’s emotional vulnerability to the audience, the Neo-Futurists convey their own.