Energetic portrayal of human experience
The San Francisco NeoFuturists no longer give each entering audience member a name tag bearing a random phrase. And since the 4-yearold company moved in to PianoFight, in February, they can no longer perform completely naked, which Co-Artistic Director Margaret McCarthy calls, with a determined smile, a “creative challenge.” (PianoFight, which has a full bar and restaurant, has a different kind of license than most straight theater venues.)
Otherwise, you might not notice much different between the troupe’s new show, “The Infinite Wrench,” and its old show, “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,” whose copyright holder announced in late 2016 that he would not renew the show’s license for the original Neo-Futurists, in Chicago, prompting them and sister troupes in New York and San Francisco to create a new show.
That continuity is a boon for the San Francisco theater scene. It means the secret sauce of “Too Much Light” just adds the same magic zing to a very similar recipe.
Ensemble members still rush to perform 30 short plays before a buzzer sounds on a prominently displayed timer at the end of 60 minutes. (The Neos “have an antagonist,” said ensemble member Ryan Patrick Welsh before the performance on Friday, Aug. 10, “and that antagonist is time.”)
The plays come from a glorious hodgepodge of tones and styles; taken together, they create as representative a kaleidoscope of the human experience as you’re likely to see in theater. A probing, soul-baring monologue about a friendship forged, lost and rekindled across political lines (Tonya
Narvaez’s excellent “I only have one conservative friend, and I don’t know how to do this”) might precede a giddy shadow puppet play about how intelligent and sexually adventurous dolphins are (”The Smartest Fish in the Sea”) or an earnest yet droll account of a child’s first utterances (Simon Pond’s “The Words He Knows”). That one manages a joke about a baby’s first existential crisis in one breath and a canny testament to a father’s love in the next, one that’s somehow more powerful for its sly understatement.
A handful of the short plays are new each week, giving each show the breathless, frothy energy of the creative process in medias res. The audience determines the order in which the short plays are performed, which means the flurry of takedown and setup in each entr’acte can be one of the best parts of “The Infinite Wrench.” When Narvaez couldn’t find a felt-tip marker she needed for her play about her conservative friend, or when Krys Seli needed a few more moments to change out of a costume made entirely of photocopies of breasts and genitalia (for the short play “Not Not Naked,” a clever workaround to PianoFight’s ban on full nudity), the shambles only enhanced the troupe’s charm.
For a conceit as contrived and blatant as a race against the clock, the San Francisco NeoFuturists are the least stagey group on Bay Area stages. For their ferocious commitment to the new, their openness to the imagination, their unvarnished honesty and can-do pep, they’re an underground power generator in an art form no one should ever deride as “dying” so long as they’re fighting the seconds ticking by.