Reality television can easily be deemed as one of the most vapid and fabricated things in the entertainment world today. Yet within the theater setting, the term “reality entertainment” is the complete opposite. Instead, it has the capacity of taking its audience members to a level of truth unlike anything they have ever experienced.
“Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,” which is scheduled to take place today at the Hammer Museum, is just that.
The show is created and performed by Chicago’s Neo-Futurists performance group.
“The show goes from comedy, to serious drama, to political theater and to abstract performance,” said Bilal Dardai, a Neo-Futurist ensemble member. “The theme for the show is honesty. Everything we write for the show demands we are honest with the audience.”
The members achieve this honesty by only writing things that come from their own lives. Yet honesty is not the only unique quality of the show. It also incorporates large audience participation and an adrenaline-infused race against time.
“The audience is handed a menu with 30 titles. The show itself is composed of 30 short shows that occur within a span of 60 minutes, and we attempt to get through all 30 before time reaches zero,” Dardai said.
“Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind” has been successfully running in Chicago for 21 years, and since its opening it has produced more than 6,000 two-minute plays. This vast number is made possible by the fact that the 30 plays change every week.
“There are 30 plays that the cast has picked for L.A., but in our home show we cycle,” Dardai said. “There are 60 members in the ensemble, and we take ourselves out throughout the year. Each week whoever is performing writes something new.”
The Neo-Futurist movement has its roots in the works of the Italian Futurists. The Neo-Futurist approach to performance is about presenting actual life on stage. There is neither pretense nor illusion; the stage simply acts as a continuation of life.
“During college I got very inspired by the Italian Futurist art movement,” said Greg Allen, founder and creator of the show and performance group. “I was inspired as to what theater should be ““ an interactive experience that embraces actuality as opposed to transporting the audience to another time and space and pretending to be what they are not.”
This concept of reality is firmly cemented and it is how the show is able to incorporate a myriad of elements that in other cases would not fit with one another. Such misfit gives the show one of its undeniable charms ““ its randomness, something most college students can identify with.
“Our audiences tend to be college students and part of that is because of the price,” Dardai said. “Randomness is part of what we do; even the admission price is random. It’s easier to go see our show than to spend $50 on a larger Broadway production.”
The show’s distinct format creates a unique experience for its audience, though this uniqueness sometimes brings confusion to its genre.
“Some people mistake the format as improvisation. But it comes from us, from ourselves as individual writers, and basically it is whatever occurs to us in the course of the week,” Allen said. “We start from ourselves and explore that reality as opposed to looking to our imaginations.”
Another way that the Neo-Futurists largely incorporate the audience is through their series of workshops that have spanned across the country.
“We have been teaching workshops for 18 years. Our focus is to introduce students to another way of performance creation,” Allen said. “We’re giving people tools to create their own work.”
Though the Neo-Futurists have toured all over the country, they will be performing in Los Angeles for the very first time.
“I heard (one of their plays) on “˜This American Life’ last year and I had to book them,” said Claudia Bestor, Hammer Museum’s director of Public Programs and Education.
“The play (was) a typical boy-meets-girl, boy-wins-girl, boy-loses-girl story, but with no dialogue. The whole tale is told in under two minutes with just descriptions of the tone of their exchange. Yet when you hear it you can imagine every word of their conversation. It was so funny and intelligent at the same time; I was really intrigued to see more of them,” she added.
With such ingenuity one can only imagine what the group has in store for its Los Angeles debut.
“We try to make the show as diverse as life itself,” Allen said. “Anything can happen on stage and we will accept that. We create a non-illusory event that is a one time only experience.”