Neo-Futurists founder Greg Allen made the surprising announcement today that he’s ending the 28-year Chicago run of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind on December 31. He’s doing so in order to create a new, diverse Chicago theater company that will be entirely dedicated to social activism.
Too Much Light continues to be produced by Neo-Futurist ensembles in New York and San Francisco and by other companies around the world.
“I could no longer stand by and let my most effective artistic vehicle be anything but a machine to fight Fascism” said Greg Allen, inventor of “Neo- Futurism” – an updating of Italian Futurism, a movement which, ironically, was created by artists who later supported Mussolini. “I was searching for an artistic response to the firestorm to come and realized I had to put my strongest artistic foot forward to combat the Trump administration and all of its cohorts.” The new ensemble will perform in a variety of theaters and spaces in neighborhoods all over Chicago, giving space and voice to marginalized people in the predominately white, patriarchal Chicago theater community. The ensemble will also create and perform fundraisers for organizations fighting for civil rights – a central part of the mission of the new company.
Since leaving the Chicago Neo-Futurists’ ensemble four years ago, Allen has continued to teach Neo-Futurism all over the world including yearly courses at the University of Chicago, the Theater School at Depaul, the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Center in Connecticut, and in residencies at theaters and universities all over North America. He founded the San Francisco Neo-Futurists who have been performing “Too Much Light” every week since December 2nd, 2013, and just returned last week from holding auditions to create a new ensemble for an ongoing production of “Too Much Light” in London. He also continues to teach and advise the New York Neo-Futurists who are now in their 13th year performing the show at the Kraine Theater in Manhattan. These branches of “Too Much Light” will continue and be unaffected by this change in Chicago. Since the 2015 Playscripts publication of Allen’s book “Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind: 90 Plays from the First 25 Years”, there have been 99 other productions of “Too Much Light” all over the country and internationally in Ireland, Japan, Germany, Australia, Mexico, Scotland, Korea, Italy, Taiwan, Portugal, Canada, China, and Tanzania. Allen hopes to launch other on-going branches of the show soon.
“Radical times call for radical change. In a country of “post-truth” and #OscarsSoWhite, I decided that closing my home-town Chicago production and rebooting the show with a new diverse ensemble was what was most necessary, promising, and hopeful. ‘Too Much Light’ has always reached an incredibly young, energized population and doing so with a specifically political message and a fundraising mission is what I think is most important for the future of our country” said Allen. Stay tuned for future press releases announcing the name of the new production company, the members of the new ensemble, and where you can see “Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind” in 2017 with a new face.
