Rep kicks theater into higher gear
Watch Duke City Repertory race through a series of hit-and-run mini-plays starting Wednesday at Tricklock Performance Space.
A mashup of vaudeville and audience participation quiz shows, “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind” ran in Chicago for nearly 30 years before closing in 2016.
Audience members can expect be greeted with a menu of numbers and play titles before curtain time. Troupe members will ask them to call out a new number when each play ends.
The Neo Futurists of Chicago performed the work by playwright Greg Allen weekly for 50 weeks annually. The actors based their aesthetic on the early 20th century Italian Futurism movement. Their taste gravitated toward non-illusory theater, where all the characters were the actors themselves and the plays were set on a stage. The Futurists celebrated technology, speed and automation.
The Neo Futurists aimed to crack a calcified world as an antidote to television. Add streaming, texting and tweeting in today’s tech-obsessed culture.
Allen’s tongue-in-cheek updating of the Futurist ethos exalts speed and chance.
He based the title on an autistic child who smashed light bulbs, repeating, “Too much light makes the baby go blind.”
“Some of the plays last 30
seconds; others last in the range of 2 to 3 minutes,” Duke City artistic director Amelia Ampuero said. “It makes for a very rapid, energetic evening of theater.”
The subject matter spans gender, race, time, guns, violence, datingromance and parenthood.
“One is a 90-second version of ‘Macbeth,’ ” Ampuero said. “There’s other pieces that border on performance art.”
In “The Shaken,” a parent discusses his abhorrence of shaking a child while admitting he understands the anger fueling it.
Other plays take a satirical look at theater.
“We found six actors who are so generous, brave and humble,” Ampuero said. “I’ve laughed harder in this first days of rehearsals than I have in a long time.”