Christopher Piatt

From an evolutionary standpoint, natural selection should have killed off the Neo-Futurists long ago. The ragtag fleet of performance artists that has been performing Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind—a late-night freak-out theater rave in which the performers attempt to perform 30 short plays in less than 60 minutes—isn’t exactly famous for being organized. Or mainstream. Or well funded. Yet remarkably, this winter Too Much Light will celebrate its 20th anniversary. After two decades of creating edgy, bite-size plays for no more than $7 (plus an amount determined by the roll of die), this strangely populist, resolutely underground show has produced multiple generations of hard-working writer-performers and won untold legions of fans, many of them nontraditional theatergoers. The show was originally a hit with suburban punks who came into the city craving alternative culture, lining up around the block in the dead of winter to score a seat. But its frenzied party energy and up-to-the-minute commentary on politics and pop culture helped secure the show a permanent place in Chicago theater. Too Much Light started as an experiment at the old Stage Left Theatre in Lakeview, made a brief stop at Live Bait Theater and eventually moved north to pregentrified Andersonville in 1992. There, in a makeshift space above a funeral parlor, the Neo-Futurists and Too Much Light carved out a place for themselves so unique, it defies comparison. With only a quicksilver moment in the nation