Welcome To Your Neo-Future
For today's media-savvy theatregoer, the seeming chaos of Neo-Futurism feels just like home
By Justin Maxwell
The Neo-Futurists (with founder Greg Allen, bottom right) at home in Chicago. Photo by Andrew Collings.
It's a chilly 58 degrees and pouring rain on this August night in Chicago, but a queue of hardy theatregoers winds up Ashland Avenue, around the corner and down Foster Avenue. They're probably just the kind of audience members you'd want lining up for a late-night show at your theatre—boisterous, diverse and clearly looking forward to a good time.
Most of these people are coming to see a show they've seen before. At the same time, most of them are coming to see a show they've never seen before. How is this paradox possible? All of them are on their way to see Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, the ever-mutating cornerstone performance of an unruly 20-year-old company that calls itself the Neo-Futurists. This may be an ugly stay-at-home-with-slippers-and-bourbon night in Chicago, but the Neo-Futurists are eight people short of a sold-out house.
Remarkably, something similar is going on this very night some 700 miles away in downtown Manhattan, where the skies are clearer and the line for an 11 p.m. Neo-Futurist show is wending down East 4th Street across from La MaMa E.T.C. If you're heading out after a performance at that renowned venue and see the line across the street, you should consider getting in it. More important, if you ask the Neo-Futurists really nicely (or offer them enough cash), a line like that could form in your town, too.
These far-flung theatre fans aren't rallying in support of a uniquely successful theatre company—they're out in force because of a particularly successful theatrical methodology. Indeed, a walk-through of an evening of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (or TML, for easy reference) holds some lessons for theatre-makers as well as theatre-watchers.
Here in Chicago, as we're standing in line, a chipper young woman comes out of the theatre, introduces herself and hands out little plastic snakes, one for each seat in the house. That way, no one waits in line without a seat waiting for them—no snake, no ticket, no last-minute disappointment. We giggle at our plastic snakes, shiver and share umbrellas until the doors open, and then file in, a happy, humid gaggle. Two performers come out to get things started. We give them our snakes and they let us roll a die that determines our ticket price—a base of nine dollars plus the amount of the roll (now we're laughing about the terrors and pleasures of capitalism). Someone asks our names and writes on a name-tag sticker—mine says "Money," and a buzz arises among patrons as we discover each other's aliases. I take a seat between "Ampersand" and "Terrorist Fist Bump." The tags are a lighthearted device to connect strangers, but there are clearly theatrical smarts at work here, too.
More instructions: Our program is really a menu, which folded in half creates a column of 30 play titles that have the potential to be performed that night. The show will run for 60 minutes—there's even a ticking clock on display for the countdown. At the end of each brief play, our job is to call out the title of another play, and the next show starts instantaneously. With some practice, we quickly become a well-drilled collective, engaged and ready for some art.
Now things get harder to describe. The hour of mini-shows is a complex panoply of works, reminiscent (not coincidentally) of the original early-20th-century Italian Futurists' very short plays, or sintesi. Tonight they range from monologues to dance, from complex political criticism to audience interaction, from the post-dramatic to the absurd, and various places in between. Some run for a few minutes, some for seconds. Everyone seems to like at least something they see, and those game for adventure seem to like it all.
Originality is the main ingredient on the menu, which, coupled with the plays' brevity, frees them of the dross that can accumulate in traditional storytelling. TML is dense and rewarding without being overwhelming. Think of the worst play you've ever seen; now, think whether you can identify two minutes of rewarding content in that long work; then, imagine that show stripped down to just those rewarding minutes. Wouldn't that have been better? Even if you answered "no," that's okay—because in TML there is something different just before and something different immediately afterward. So the works that might not resonate within TML are lost in the mélange of everything that succeeds. Few theatrical experiences offer so much, so fast, with such intensity.
WHEN THE CLOCK HITS 60 THE SHOW STOPS, PERIOD. TONIGHT, IT STOPS WITH ONE potential play left. There is raucous applause. But we're not done yet: The actors lead us through a process of choosing which of that night's shows will be cut and replaced with new material the next week. There's more applause, and the audience wanders down to join the cast on stage and in the lobby. On the nights when the show sells out, the house orders pizza, extending the evening.
There's more (with the Neo-Futurists, there's always more). While TML is the heart of Neo-Futurist programming, the company presents various mainstage performances as well, known as "prime-time shows." These are full-length works generated by cast members and steeped in the same aesthetic that undergirds TML. A recent show called Beer made its way to the Great American Beer Festival in Denver, while Fear utilized all the rooms of the Neo-Futurarium (the name lovingly given to the company's Ashland Avenue performance space) to animate a selection of works by Edgar Allen Poe last Halloween. This past summer's annual Neo-Futurist "film festival," dubbed "It Came from the Neo-Futurarium," consisted of complexly staged readings of the scripts of terrible films—highlighted by Vanilla Ice's cinematic monstrosity Cool as Ice, performed with a loving sense of straightforward sincerity that let the script, well, speak for itself in a way it never could on the screen. Naturally, an ice-cream social preceded the final performance.
The Neo-Futurists have been engaged in these kinds of culturally astute hijinks for two decades, during which they've woven a practical sense of theatricality into the evolving aesthetics of cutting-edge work. They've capitalized on Chicago's strong history of improv comedy. And, especially with TML, they've embraced the temporality of performance art—miss a play one weekend and you're likely never to see it again. These elements have combined to form a theatrical attraction that sustains itself, its audience and its performers—and shows no sign of losing steam. In fact, five years ago the New York Neo-Futurists set up shop and, like the Chicago originals, are producing exciting work with the same artistic credo—meaning, for one thing, that all involved in the collective have equal say (instead of a top-down model led by an artistic director).
Here's why it all works: The Neo-Futurists are drawing on complex aesthetic traditions that have been shaping non-narrative art and theatre for nearly a hundred years. Quite simply, the company is using good theory to make good art. According to founder Greg Allen, Neo-Futurism draws on ideas from people like Augusto Boal (Theatre of the Oppressed) and Richard Schechner (Environmental Theater) to consciously make work unique to its performance space. The group has also adopted Ionesco's sardonic position that traditional performance is just people up on stage lying, pretending to be someone else, somewhere else. The Neo-Futurists have rigorously rejected a representational conceit—they never try to suspend audience disbelief—and have replaced it with what Allen simply calls "truth on stage." They reject mimesis for intensified catharsis.
At their core, the Neo-Futurists have taken the wild, loud-at-heart surprise of Tommaso Marinetti and the other Italian Futurists and brought it into the new millennium—and if you're cringing at the mention of the Italian Futurists, don't worry, because Allen and company have left the icky parts of Futurism (the love of war, industry and fascism) back in the nineteen-teens. That means the new sintesi of the Neo-Futurists can be simultaneously grounded in a long tradition while being intensely new and relevant.
Another tie to the original Futurists is the use of the manifesto. Each of the small sets of instructions the incoming audience receives serves as a surreptitious manifesto priming them for the upcoming experience. More formally, Allen's prospectus "25 Rules for Creating Good Theatre" can be seen as the cornerstone of Neo-Futurist work, comparable to the "Variety Theatre" manifesto, which was foundational to much of Futurism.
On the other hand, Neo-Futurist work, its postmodern pedigree notwithstanding, is decidedly not postmodern. It can indeed be absurd, performative, plastic and nonrepresentational—but the Neo-Futurists can (and do) abandon those elements at their artistic convenience. More important, their work isn't fundamentally self-referential, and it does not consciously deconstruct master narratives (to cite the two defining elements of the po-mo agenda). Neo-Futurist structure is the structure of generational experience: its greatest strength might be a sense of community.
Late Generation X-ers (and every American born since) have grown up in a plastic, heavily mediated culture of indeterminacy. Consequently, the seeming chaos of TML just feels like home. And the surprise of a Neo-Futurist prime-time show is familiar without any loss of originality. Because the performers are consistently themselves and are intensely involved in generating the material, the audience knows them and forms a relationship with the company, instead of a vicarious or voyeuristic relationship with a character. This, plus the shared concentration and interactivity between performers and spectator, creates an environment where the audience is just as committed to a successful performance as the performers.
On that rainy Chicago night, just after I found a seat, everyone in my row was handed a slip of paper by a cast member. Each had instructions giving us six things to do during one of the plays, and ended with the parenthetical "(this will rock if you participate. Otherwise it will suck. You wouldn't want that, would you?)." This admonition had the effect of giving our row direct ownership of the performance—we were fundamentally attached to the community of the show, part of an audience with a direct stake in the success of the evening.
Consistently returning audiences allow the Neo-Futurist community to solidify and grow, as the shows never stagnate or become repetitive. Old audience members return and new ones are intrigued enough to stay. Given the strength of this community and its demonstrated ability to spread, there's only one long-term conclusion: Welcome to your Neo-Future.
Minneapolis-based Justin Maxwell is an American Theatre Affiliated Writer, with support from a grant from the Jerome Foundation.
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