another artistic foray into the random world of john cage
by Liz Fekete
Recently i went to see a theater group called the neo-futurists put on a
show called 'too much light makes the baby go blind.' the whole show is
run by chance. how much money you pay to get in is determined by the roll
of a die ($3 base plus whatever you roll -- of course, i had to pay the
full 9 dollars). they have 30 short plays which they try to perform in
one hour's time. (there's a big dark room timer on the wall.) the numbers
1-30 hang from a clothesline above the stage and the audience, who has a
list of what each play is titled, shouts out numbers and the actors
perform that play. plays were things like "if you wait long enough,
something is bound to happen," where the actors sit in a row on the stage
and literally wait for something to happen. also "diana takes the show
hostage," "knock-knock joke gone bad," and "gimme a D" which consists of
an actor shouting at the audience "gimme a D", and the audience shouting
back "D". the end. it was absolutely wonderful. really funny stuff. i
think they have a troupe in nyc and san francisco too.
The show has been scheduled to run for 7 years. At the end of each
show, they ask a member of the audience to roll a six-sided die 2 times.
That number (9 in the case of the show I saw) is the number of new "plays"
they have to write within a week. Thus, if you go back to the show in a
month, it will be practically all new plays.
POETRY
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Last modified: Wednesday, 18-Jul-2007 16:24:47 EDT