WHAT DOES FUTURE HOLD FOR NEO- FUTURISTS?
Always political, troupe vows to move forward after losing ‘ Too Much Light’
Chicago theater company stands firm after founder pulls “Too Much Light”
Of all the shows I’ve seen by the Neo- Futurists, the company that arrived on the Chicago theater scene in 1988 and continues to attract fervent audiences, my favorite remains “43 Plays for 43 Presidents,” an alternately zany and profound catalog of theatrical portraits of each of the U.S commander sin chief, from George-Washington through George W. Bush, that was created by Andy Bayiates and four collaborators.
So there is a delicious irony in the fact that last week, Greg Allen, the founder of the Neo- Futurists and the creator of “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind”— this city’s longest- running late- night phenomenon that came with the promise of “30 plays in 60 minutes, plus the delivery of a pizza if the house was sold out”— quite brusquely, if not entirely unexpectedly, announced he was pulling the rights for the Chicago edition of the Neo- Futurists ( others exist in various forms in New York, San Francisco and London) to perform “Too Much Light.”
The reason? Attempts to follow up with Allen went unanswered, but in his press release, he said: “I could no longer stand by and let my most effective artistic vehicle be anything but a machine to fight fascism. I was searching for an artistic response to the firestorm to come and realized I had to put my strongest artistic foot forward to combat the Trump administration and all of its cohorts.”
Although Allen’s “Neo- Futurism” concept was inspired by Italian Futurism, an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century and emphasized speed, technology, youth and the industrial city ( and included fascist sympathizers along the way), the late 20th- century version of it was far more idealistic in nature. And Allen and his collaborators drew on Dada and Surrealism, on the experiments with audience interaction that took hold in the 1960s, and more.
The short “playlets” in the rapidly changing “Too Much Light” shows, with pieces added weekly by a team of writers who worked on rapid- fire deadlines, dealt with everything from politics to personal angst and more grandly philosophical matters. Its quick turnaround of material made a company like the Second City, which sometimes keeps a show on its main stage for as long as a year, seem wear- dated.
So what will change for the Neo- Futurists now that Allen ( who hasn’t been involved with the daytoday work of the Chicago company since 2003) has decided to end his licensing agreement with the Neo- Futurists to create, as he put it, an ensemble “comprised entirely of people of color, LBTQ+, artist/ activist women, and other disenfranchised voices”? ( Of course, as anyone who has been observing the Chicago theater scene in recent years knows, that is far from an original mission statement.)
Kendall Karg, managing director of the Neo- Futurists, noted that in addition to the late- night “Too Much Light” shows, the company presents full- length works at “prime time” theater hours. And while much discussion will be under way in the next few weeks about how the company will move on, the concept of a late- night show of short pieces, which seems ideally matched to a moment when the president- elect is a compulsive tweeter, is not over. The only thing that must change is the name.
“During the course of its history, the Neo- Futurists have created about 9,775 short plays, and each of them belongs to the artist or artists who wrote them,” said Karg, adding, “What is surprising is that we have dealt with every current topic in our recent shows: Trump, of course, but also guns, and privacy, and the internet and social media, and the war in Syria, and the Chicago school system, and violence. ...
“And while we will continue to discuss what our late- night shows on 50 weekends of the year will look like, our commitment to being something of a living newspaper and a champion of the unconventional remains the same.”
Karg, who oversees an annual budget of about $ 500,000 ( and says that payments to Allen of 6 percent royalties for any performance of the show will end along with the use of the “Too Much Light” name), seemed surprised by Allen’s suggestion that the Neo-Futurist ensemble was not diverse.
“We have a group of 12 writerperformers, half male and half female with one openly transgender person, and our audience has a wide range of racial and sexual identities. We have reached out to the disabled community and the LGBT community and established an in- house workshop for students that offers many scholarships aimed at diversity. We’re committed to the same things Greg says he wants his new ensemble to be committed to.”
The company continues to attract that ultra- desirable demographic— 18- to 24- year- olds— to its late- night shows.
So I return to “43 Presidents,” about which I can only reiterate what I said in my review: “The eccentricity, ineptitude, unpreparedness, egotism and sudden bursts of inspiration and intelligence of this [ presidential] lineup may simply be a testament to democracy at work. They are us, if only the entirely white, male version.”