MAN. Statement. Statement. Statement. Question?
WOMAN. Agreement.
MAN. Reassured statement. Confident statement. Confident statement.
Overconfident statement.
WOMAN. Question?
Thus begins the dialogue of TITLE, one of the 30 Neo-Futurist plays, the argumentative first date ending with WOMAN exiting and MAN destroyed at a table. A scene you might have lived through yourself; the conversation feeling like a scripted text where you are, by social standards, forced to continue asking questions and making non-specific statements until the opportunity to leave presents itself.
Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is not a play as you usually see it on stage. Instead of a developing string of action, you get thirty two-minute plays with a wide range of topics and emotions covered, that will be played in an ever changing sequence that is influenced by you, the audience. You will decide on a title from our menu of the 30 plays and shout out its sequence number. With its corresponding placard pulled down from the clothes line hanging overhead, this play will start. After two minutes, the same procedure will be repeated.
The next play might thus just be the one called Fool-Hearty, in which one of the actors opens up with true confessions to three other actors, lowering down from a very intimate one to more trivial ones, but being rebuffed by all. She lowers her issue even more down to just asking the time from the fourth person before then attempting again to make an intimate confession.
The concept of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind was developed by author, actor and director Greg Allen in the late 1980s. He called it “Neo-Futurist“, based on the Italian “Futurism“ movement from the early 20th century. He regarded his show as “an ongoing experiment in performing“. It ran in Chicago in The Neo-Futurists own theatre for nearly 30 years. The plays you will see are based on every day life; the actors or you could ideally have experienced them yourselves. There are no defined roles, actors will be themselves throughout the show. As will you, the audience, as you watch and interact with the actors on stage in this immersive, emotional-rollercoaster of a performance. Enjoy!