30 plays in 60 minutes. Can you handle it????

The New York Neo-Futurist’s Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is sixty minutes of wonderful. A jumble of crude language, Easter suits, stereotypes, pop culture references, and spaghetti molded into thirty plays, this show is what would happen if Charlie Sheen and Sarah Palin were blended together and sold as a low-fat fruit drink at an organic Mormon flea market: mind boggling. Yet, despite the actor’s entertaining antics and the ridiculous sketch titles (“Kevin and the Anthropomorphized Key-tar”), the production still conveys a humanitarian feel, a comforting moral of human cohesion through a common insanity.

Innovative from the start, to purchase tickets at the door the Neo-Futurists have you role a die and add that number to eleven, the sum being the cost of your ticket (unless you have a High 5 voucher!). Once inside, a Neo-Futurist loudly asks for your name, and then writes random words on a nametag and slaps it to your face. During the performance, a laundry line of plays hangs across the stage, each with a bizarrely drawn number from one to thirty, and the audience is given “Menus” of the plays to which each number refers. At the end of every play, a Neo-Futurist calls “Curtain!” and the audience must scream the number of the play they want to see. It is an exciting process, a game inspired specifically for those with ADHD.

The madness that is Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind creates not only constant laughter, but also an actual set of characters. Although it is clear that the plays main purpose is not to insightfully diagnose and explore each Neo-Futurists’ life goals, the actors’ personalities still shine through their roles in each play with a certain amount of consistency. Furthermore, it is not talent but willingness to let loose that defines the best Neo-Futurists. The audience has fun because the actors are having fun.

A hybrid of existentialist angst and spontaneity, the Neo-Futurists know exactly how to use the audience. While the show is not interactive, the actors do pick specific audience members for certain tricks, and then, in Blue-Man Group style, humiliate them. The show is an unstructured version of Saturday Night Live: the funniest moments being the bull’s-eye pop culture comments and when the actors start to laugh. The happenings in Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is the New York Times front page three months after world peace, the surreal result of embracing stereotypes while making them seem original. Clever, innovative, and witty, my face still hurts from smiling so much during that one hour performance; there is a whole lot of love in this show.