Crime and Punishment: A (Mis)Guided Environmental Tour With Literary Pretensions at the Neo-Futurarium, through April 11
Likewise Allen’s brainchild Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind broke all the rules when it first opened a little more than nine years ago. Devoted to delivering 30 performancelike plays in 60 minutes or die trying, the show is too playful, too unafraid of entertainment to qualify as performance art. Nor is it mere comedy, even though to the untrained eye Too Much Light looks a lot like a Second City revue: over the years it’s addressed such serious issues as homophobia and self-esteem.
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But it’s the relationship Allen and his fellow Neo-Futurists have cultivated with their audience that truly sets this group apart. The very structure of Too Much Light maximizes audience interaction: audience members are given false names at the door, they roll a die to determine how much they’ll pay for admission, and they’re encouraged to shout out which piece they’d like to see next. Even when the Neo-Futurists are offstage, they refuse to acknowledge the fourth wall. They chat with audience members before and after the show—and during the week via the Internet, on the Neo-Futurists’ sometimes trivial, sometimes fascinating, always chatty site (www.neofuturist.org), moderated by Too Much Light cast member Dave Awl (“Day Voll”).
Somehow, everyone’s activities mesh with everyone else’s. For example, someone took the glass of water I filled and left it in another room, where later in the show I encountered it and was asked to drink it down, trusting that it hadn’t been tampered with. Other audience members were required to pass judgment on fellow audience members’ crimes.
It would be just as narrow to call this a stage adaptation of Foucault’s ideas, however, as to say it’s an adaptation of Dostoyevsky. Significantly, Allen and Kalista helpfully provide the audience with a whole shelfful of books, ranging from Nabokov’s Despair and Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find to works by Foucault and an Amnesty International publication put out in 1989. They’ve neatly labeled this shelf “bibliography.”
