At 6:15 PM on Sunday, December 4, in the middle of the season’s first real snowfall, there was already a line snaking down the block and around the corner at Ashland and Foster, awaiting entry to the Neo-Futurists’ second-floor theater and another sold-out performance in the 28-year run of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.
In 1988, given the opportunity to create a late-night weekend show at Stage Left, Allen, then 26, came up with a concept he’d been thinking about since he studied Italian futurism at Oberlin College. His idea was to create a permanent format for an ever-changing menu of very short experimental plays, drawn from the lives of the playwrights and performed by them, with honesty and artistic freedom as core values. Ticket prices (determined by a dice toss) would be variable and cheap, to make the show accessible.
The ensemble are now scrambling to assemble a replacement for the production that’s always been the anchor of their roughly $500,000 annual budget (and a season that includes prime-time shows and outreach). They’ve also reopened a fund-raising campaign, and are seeking to raise $28,000 by the end of the year. But they’re definitely not planning to fold. “We have our schedule, we have our space, we have a process for creating short Neo-Futurists work,” artistic director Kurt Chiang said in an interview last week.
