The Neo-Futurists

I'm in the middle of a PL/1 training which is going a little bit slow (we're on if/select statements) so I thought, "What a great time to update the blog!" Since I've been talking a lot of politics lately I thought I'd change it up for a bit, so I'm going to briefly talk about a theatre company that I saw last week called the Neo-Futurists. They were playing at the Metropolis Theatre in Arlington Heights, but usually they perform their material in their own space in the city. The play they performed was called "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind," which consisted of 30 independent plays in 60 minutes. This unto itself is pretty impressive, but what really got me is that every week they get rid of a certain number of plays and write new ones, so if you go see the play a couple of months apart you could potentially see two completely different shows.

Overall the performance was worth seeing though -- though perhaps not deep or particularly thought provoking, it was at the very least quite clever. They placed a timer at the front of the stage set for an hour and had a clothesline full of numbered pieces of paper from 1 to 30. The audience would shout out a number, which they grabbed from the clothesline and read the title off of the back. They would then get set up for the play, read the title once more, then begin. Some of the more entertaining ones involved an orange that forgot its lines, two lovers 'in the time of cholera,' Turkey-Man, one called 'If a Play Happens in the Lobby and No One is There to See It, Is It Still Art?', 'Slow Fade to Black,' and 'This Weird Thing Between Us.' Like I said at the top, they play in the city all the time in their own space, where I believe the cost of admission is $5 plus the role of one six-sided die. It's worth seeing.