Earlier this month the Neo-Futurists celebrated the 25th anniversary of their signature theatrical production, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Fifty weeks a year, the ensemble write and rehearse 30 original two-minute plays based on their own lives and observations. Each audience member (whose price of admission is $9 plus the roll of a die) receives a “menu” of play titles. Thirty numbers are hung from a clothesline above the stage, and audience members call out which play they want to see. Actors take that number off the clothesline, perform the play, the audience chooses the next, and this continues until the 60-minute timer is up (no matter how many plays are left on the clothesline; zero is the goal). Each weekend, a roll of the dice decides how many plays are taken out of the menu, and ensemble members write new ones to replace them. As such, no two performance of TML have ever been the same.
I had auditions at Stage Left—I asked the woman who worked with me at the bookstore if she wanted to be in it because she was a singer, asked an old collaborator of mine and a couple SL members as well. We had nine people and I started rehearsing with them and kind of preaching the Neo-Futurist aesthetic and creating material. I figured out that we might be able to pull off 30 short plays in 60 minutes, so that became the tagline to the show. We charged $1 times a roll of the die and opened on December 2, 1988.
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When I started putting together TML I told people, “I’m creating a show that will run forever.” It’s hard to admit that I had the hubris to say things like that, but I definitely designed the show to have an open run so that it was changing every week, people would come back, it would inspire performers who were creating, and it would also inspire the audience to return. So the clothesline, the dice roll, the name tags, the random order of the plays, the menu, all the new plays every week—all those things were put together in a formula that would presumably succeed if it kept going. So I never had a closing date when I opened it. It was designed as a long-term endeavor.
The first review was in the Reader, Tony Adler, we had like two paragraphs. I think he called King Lear brilliant, and then he alluded to the fact that the Italian Futurists had become fascists, so this sparked a controversy in the letters column of the Reader that lasted for months. So it was great publicity for us.
People started hearing about us and people started coming back. That was a good sign. Early on, literally, I talked to every single person who saw the show, so I really got to know the audience.
Allen: I have a graph of our attendance for the first year in my office that I discovered the other day and it kind of just goes vrooooop, it goes straight up until we sold out our first show.
Ridarelli: Those were big milestones actually—not artistic so much but just, OK, we need to get our shit together. Moving here and having somebody work as a managing director. Our office was where now we keep the toilet paper. It was ridiculous. We’ve got a much bigger support staff now than we ever did. Back in the day it was, you gotta roll the dice, you gotta write the numbers for the clothesline, you gotta go buy props. You gotta run tech. You always had to sort of count on a person from the ensemble to, like, run to the booth and turn on lights or hit play or something. Getting a tech person was a huge milestone, actually.
Open run: Fri-Sat 11:30 PM, Sun 7 PMNeo-Futurarium5153 N. Ashland773-878-4557neofuturists.org$9 plus the roll of a die
