"Undigested Reading" and the New York Neo-Futurists

In my essay "Undigested Reading: Rethinking Stage Directions through Affect," published in the September 2018 issue of Theatre Journal, I coin the term "affective stage directions" to define stage directions that do more than simply describe the visual picture onstage, as found in plays by Tennessee Williams, Sarah Ruhl, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, and Eugene O'Neill, to name a few. Affective stage directions use metaphors, abstract pictures, and alternate scenarios to engage the imaginations and bodies of the theatre-makers who will enact these words onstage. For example, in Ruhl's play The Clean House (2004) when, "For a moment, Lane and Virginia experience a primal moment during which they are seven and nine years old, inside the mind, respectively. They are mad. Then they return quite naturally to language, as adults do," there is no silent shorthand by which these actors could conjure this exact sentence in the minds of audiences. And yet there are many ways in which two actors could create a scene that feels like this.¹ One of the major points I make in this piece is that these sections of text are more reliant upon the bodily experiences and understandings of actors than the dialogue, and therefore performances of such stage directions are heavily influenced by cultural context, geographic location, and bodily norms of the time. One of the examples I use to illustrate how affective stage directions can shift in meaning and signification over time is that of the New York Neo-Futurists's production of The Complete & Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O'Neill, volume 1: Early Plays/Lost Plays in 2011. It was conceived and adapted by Neo-Futurist Christopher Andrew Loar, who has generously provided access to the following video clips of the piece. O'Neill is a playwright world-renowned for his detailed and lengthy stage directions, and Loar was curious to see what would happen if the stage directions were removed from their surrounding dialogue. The result has given birth to two volumes of The Complete & Condensed, which has moved chronologically through O'Neill's early work. [End Page E-3]

Connor Sampson, Kyra Sims, Joey Rizzolo, Nicole Hill, Jill Beckman, and Colin Summers (l-r) in Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (2016). (Photo: © Hunter Canning.)

CLIP: Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, by the New York Neo-Futurists (2009) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=xszRfWv0-9U)

This clip above gives us insight into how The Complete & Condensed came about as part of the Neos' genre-defying weekend show called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind in 2009. The New York Neo-Futurists is the New York branch of Neo-Futurism, which was founded in Chicago by Greg Allen in 1988. Allen's initial show premiered that year and was called Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and consisted of thirty short plays to be performed in sixty minutes. The Neos, as their name suggests, follow the tenets of Italian Futurism, meaning that they are interested in plays that reflect the immediacy of the contemporary moment, hence resulting in short plays that do not require an extended time to produce. To this end, the Neos play themselves at whatever time and in whatever location the show is taking place, and they are really doing whatever they are performing onstage. For example, they are well-known for using real alcohol onstage during their plays, as opposed to substituting it with a non-alcoholic beverage. In both the Chicago and New York versions of Too Much Light, after being presented with a "menu" of thirty play titles that correspond to a series of numbered papers clipped to a clothesline onstage, the audience yells out a number for a play it would like to see performed. Anything that happens after the play title of that number is read out is to be considered as the play, which does not end until the actor says, "Curtain." At this point, the show stops until an audience member calls out another number for a new...