True Dreams of Annie Arbor
What emerged from my early, frustrating discussions with Allen was an idea of what neofuturism wasn’t rather than what it was. The Neo-Futurists opposed the usual tricks of theater: they never pretended to be anywhere but on a stage talking with–or performing for–an audience. In the years when they performed late night on other people’s stages, it didn’t matter what set was behind them, a fake kitchen one week, a courtroom the next. And as you might expect from a show conceived during the post-crash 80s, Too Much Light could be enacted with few, if any, of theater’s usual tools. All it needs is a timer, a clothesline long enough to hold 30 pieces of paper, and a space about as long and wide as your average front hallway.
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For a long time “neofuturism” seemed little more than a marketing device that set the company apart from all the theaters in the Bush era rushing forward into the comfortable past. Over time, however, it’s become clear that Allen has a consistent aesthetic, revealed as much in the new True Dreams of Annie Arbor as it is in the Neo-Futurists’ inaugural show. Allen loves pieces that are highly structured. Too Much Light has more rules than a board game: a roll of the die determines the cost of admission, audience members are given false names, performers put on 30 plays in 60 minutes, and when the show sells out they order out for pizza. Yet he also loves highly fragmented shows with a built-in potential for chaos, or at least bits of unexpected behavior. (In this respect the Neo-Futurists have a lot in common with the 60s Fluxus movement and the dadaists, both devoted to bringing life-giving chaos to societies too ordered for their own good.)
What makes this a thoroughly Neo-Futurist production, however, is the decision–by Roberts or Allen or both–to have only three actors play all the characters in this populous work, a “rule” that effects a dreamlike fluidity among the 15 characters. Thus David Kodeski plays the pot-bellied father, the protagonist’s fratboy brother, and a leering, violence-prone thug in a wig. Diana Slickman plays a prostitute, mom, the protagonist’s girlfriend, and even dad after a wasting disease. And Roberts himself plays the son and a pimp (though he’s curiously distant from his roles). This approach requires lots of quick costume changes; indeed, Allen refers in his bio to his stint as one of the “quick-change dressers” in Remains Theatre’s 1987 production of Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep, which requires two actors to play all the characters in a gothic drama. And there’s more than a little of Ludlam’s creative anarchy in this production’s quick changes.
