When you first spot the KGB Bar, you may be slightly taken aback. In fact, craning your neck to try to see over the girl whose hat looks like a monster that’s eating her head, you may even doubt that it’s the the right address. But soon enough, a young lady will poke her head out from a doorway above the stairs and scream “Hey! Are you guys all here for Too Much Light?” — and you’ll know this is it.

Stepping in to unfold the crumpled High5 voucher, you”ll receive a party trinket of some sort, perhaps an oversized ring. Then, since it’s still 9:35 or so, you’ll go out to explore the area. Besides being the perfect venue for such a spectacular show, the Kraine Theater is also in the heart of the East Village, a fantastic place for windowshopping in corner boutiques and pretentiously sipping microscopic espresso in artsy mugs. But by 10:20, you had better return to the site, because a line of sweatshirted college students and disenchanted poets will already be straining to get in.

Still got the Yahtzee fingers? You’ll need them as you enter Kraine theater, where dice are rolled to set the final ticket price. Once inside, you’re greeted by a cast member in jumbo sunglasses writing down your name (Ruffles, Splat, SweetPea and the like) on “Hello, My Name is…” stickers. To get the friendly ambiance going, there’s an enthusiastic pre-show Roman Numeral Countup (i.e. yelling out the I–XX digits as “Aye” to “Ex, Ex”).

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is determined by which plays are selected by the audience. Thirty papers are strung up on a clothesline, each with a wacky font or some relevant image. At the call of “Curtain!”, audience members cry out their chosen number and an actor jumps, grabs the paper and chucks it at the crowd. The plays are all two minutes long, clocked by a black-and-white timer which serves as a support for a plastic squirrel allegedly purchased on Ebay. These two haphazard props echo the spirit of the Neo-Futurists: fast-paced, consumer-friendly and casually hipster. When the timer hits 60 minutes, the “curtain” calls stop and the show is over — whether twenty-nine or all thirty plays have been seen.

Too Much Light… is a superb mashup of vignettes about the multi-faceted quality of life: frustrated homemakers, wise-guy pigeons, bastard TV’s and promiscuous interviewers all rush through the scenes, heavy on the humor and light on their feet. Each troupe members is a performer, writer, director and producer rolled up into one.

Onstage, actors maintain the genuine depth of their actual identities and, in accordance with the Neo-Futurist philosophy, they perform with an air of honesty without taking on false characteristics. In the March 14th performance, Eevin, Rob, Alicia, Lauren, Ryan and Erica introduced themselves and remained true to their namesakes. Gertrude Stein, we might imagine, would pronounce that “Eevin is Eevin is Eevin.” Indeed, it wouldn’t be so far fetched to have a gravelly voice emerging from odd origins. In “Rock Puppet Theater Presents: The Day I Wondered if She Was Ever Really Going To Leave Him”, two concrete slabs with Sharpie-d eyes gabble as their vocals creep out backstage.

A more absurdist sample, “Play for the Woman on the F Train” involves four characters devouring eucharist-like wine and crackers while Lauren is dragged by Ryan’s feet towards the audience.

Still others invite the audience to participate: “The World’s Most Uncomfortable First Kiss” (toothbrush, lip balm and deodorant included) involves Erica eagerly prepping for that sensational moment and the play “dervish” finds Ryan, Lauren, Erica and Eevin spinning and humming in a hilariously distorted version of the four winds. The range of genres and topics is as diverse as the citizenry of New York City, with a dollop of ketchup and a hint of tinny Coney Island music.

While generally dabbling with comedy, some plays cover more sober topics. “An Open Letter to Pat Benatar” explores Lauren’s past history as a classically trained ballerina (concluding with her pirouettes and the latter members’ ecstatic hopping) and “untitled theatrical layering experiment” examines a theatrical form of human Photoshopping.

Too Much Light… has been running for five years, and the Neo-Futurists repertoire is constantly expanding: the sum of the numbers on the dice rolled on each Friday and Saturday show reflect the amount of plays removed from the list (to be refreshed with new additions by the following weekend). Its popularity can undoubtedly be attributed to the energy of the actors and the awesome content of the scripts. Personally, this baby was blinded by the brilliance of the NY Neo-Futurists performance and would recommend it to everyone.