The New York Neo-Futurists and the San Francisco Neo-Futurists are voluntarily giving up performing Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, and will debut a new late-night show in January in collaboration with the original Chicago company, the three sets of Neos announced in a joint statement Monday afternoon.
Neo-Futurists founder Greg Allen, who was voted out of the Chicago company several years ago, announced suddenly on November 30 that he would not be renewing the Chicago Neos’ license to his trademarked title after it expires on December 31, instead choosing to relaunch Too Much Light himself in the new year with a new ensemble. That announcement from Allen (who still has yet to respond to my request for further comment) came with little warning to the Chicago company.
“We had been in negotiations all year,” artistic director Kurt Chiang told me in a phone conversation on December 2. “I found out that he wasn’t planning on signing back with us the day of, and shortly after I was getting a call from you. These negotiations had been cut short by a decision that was made on one end.”
In his letter to press on November 30, Allen stated that the New York, San Francisco and the nascent London companies of Neo-Futurists would be unaffected by his decision to pull the show from Chicago. The New York and San Fran Neos’ response, apparently, is “thanks, but no thanks.”
“We’re excited to move forward with our sister companies in San Francisco and Chicago,” says New York Neo-Futurists board president Bradley Rolston in the joint statement. “Our companies have increasingly shared tours and exchanges within Too Much Light, and in this collaborative spirit, our Ensemble is thrilled to forge ahead with Neo-Futurists all over the country.”
San Francisco Neo-Futurists artistic director Adam Smith adds, “The foundation of our work is continuous creation, rigorous experimentation and replacement. It’s exciting for the ensemble to continue evolving the form alongside our sibling companies on a national scale. We will continue to invite audiences into our lives and encourage them to interrogate the world around them.”
“The philosophy of the company has always been that the plays that are inside Too Much Light are owned by the individual writers themselves,” Chiang told me. “That work that is guided by the aesthetic of Neo-Futurism and by the working process of the entire ensemble—that doesn’t go [away] along with [the name] Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. We have all that work that we’ve created for many years, and we have a process that allows us to create that work at a weekly clip. So the plan right now is to continue with that process and those [performance] times and the audience that comes to our building at those times. Now, the branding of it, the name of that show? That’s something that we’re getting together and game-planning from now to the end of the year.”
Whatever the name of the show, it will debut in all three cities in January.
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