Neo-Futurism and Our Short Attention Spans

BY Dena Beard

I had the inordinately difficult task of trying to reconcile Chicago theater with Chicago ranting this past weekend. The issue was this: take my visiting parents to the prestigious Steppenwolf Theatre to see Wedding Band, which seemed like an exercise in patience, or take them to that always unexpected, sometimes preachy, sometimes whiny, insidiously funny Neo-Futurist show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. By the time Sunday night rolled round, I felt I had paid my dues at the Sears Tower of Tourism and the Malignant Mile, and opted for the rowdy antics of Too Much Light.

Performed with a fast pace and ferocity, Too Much Light is a whirlwind hodgepodge of 30 plays performed in 60 minutes, spanning from short zingers on Super Bowl Sunday to a revealing dialogue on the health insurance discrepancies between Viagra and female contraceptives. The typical show is impossible to gauge because they randomly scrap as many as six new shows a week. Take the price of your ticket; the roll of a dice randomly selects this fate. These awkward Neo-Futurist methods mix easily with the flippancy of two-minute plays, resulting in a novelty show that is confrontational and democratic.

This particular brand of late-night theater has been running at the Ashland Avenue Neo-Futurarium for over 13 years now, much to the acclaim of the general public. Unfor-tunately, the widespread success of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind has overshadowed the more serious projects of the Neo-Futurist Theater Company. Certainly it would have been more scholarly to do a review of Greg Allen and John Pierson's A Duchampian Romp, perhaps more relevant to SAIC as well, but the bonds of out-of-town visitors and a general fear of more rigorous mental challenge has tied me to Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, for now anyway. So, I beg this readership, go forth as an emissary to us all and explore not only Too Much Light, but also other Neo-Futurist endeavors. Surely all of us are not afraid of substantial artistic performances, or should I expect to be reviewing the Sing-A-Long Wizard of Oz next?