Defend Your Taste The Neo-Futurists' Greg Allen

Greg Allen of The Neo-Futurists is best known as the creator of Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, the long-running, ever-changing series of 30 plays in 60 minutes. But now Allen is taking on a slightly longer piece: Eugene O’Neill’s epic Strange Interlude, which covers 25 years in the life of tormented Nina Leeds, chockfull of love affairs, manipulation, shocking death, spiritual agony, and lengthy monologues in which characters reveal their innermost thoughts. It’s a nine-act opus that the Neos are presenting in only five hours. The A.V. Club asked Allen to defend his audacious, ass-numbing tastes.

The A.V. Club: Why shift gears so far from what you do, venturing into “one play in five hours” territory?
Greg Allen: Well, the Neo-Futurists are known for doing 30 plays in 60 minutes, but we’ve also done over 50 other full-length productions. The Neo-Futurist aesthetic is not limited to short plays, it is more about a performance style which involves never suspending the audience’s disbelief, by showing actual life onstage, by creating a community experience that is one of a kind, un-reproducible, by having audience interaction involved. So it’s not so much what you do as how you do it, how you relate to an audience, and [to] make it an immediate experience for them.
AVC: So why O’Neill and why Strange Interlude?
GA: Well, why O’Neill is that the Goodman was doing an O’Neill Festival, and [Artistic Director] Bob Falls called me up [to do a show]. I started reading O’Neill and I hit upon Strange Interlude pretty early on and just fell in love with the play. I think it’s kind of jaw-droppingly awful—in terms of awe-inspiring, not necessarily horrendously bad; in terms of it’s kind of this horror play which I found extremely funny. I am definitely re-envisioning Strange Interlude and exposing all of its zits and carbuncles and poking fun at O’Neill to a certain degree, fun at the incredible bravado it took to create a nine-act, seven-hour play—ours is going to clock in at about five, I had to cut two hours. The audience, I think, will be subjected to a horrendously funny, horribly serious tragic experience at the same time, which is kind of also shocking.
AVC: So what makes this staging you are doing, with a different style in every act, more than just screwing around onstage with a classic play?
GA: I think it’s important to screw around with a classic play. I have no trouble with that at all. I think it’s a way of actually injecting life into things that would sit on the shelf forever, Strange Interlude being one of them. I think no director in his right mind would touch Strange Interlude with a 30-foot pole, and so it’s perfect for me.
AVC: And you think that people will be able to stay awake the entire time?
GA: Oh, oh yeah. It’s a very entertaining show, oh yes. The variety with which the nine acts are presented is pretty startling. One act we perform without any text at all, we just do the stage directions, one act is only the internal thoughts, in microphone in the dark, one act… well, we actually replace one of the actors with a Cabbage Patch Doll, because it’s such a wooden character I couldn’t imagine actually giving it to a human being.
AVC: Are people still able to follow the story if you’re messing with it that much?
GA: Oh yeah. I think I’ve really mastered high concepts being accessible for massive audiences—30 plays in 60 minutes and Neo-Futurism and all that. I think it’s still very accessible unlike, say, the Wooster Group’s Emperor Jones, which was the first show of the festival. I think Neo-Futurism always lends itself to being very accessible to the audience because the actors are all very unadorned, very much presenting the show, and are people just like you. We leave the house lights on, there’s a seventh-act stretch.
AVC: Say somebody’s not an O’Neill scholar—who’s never heard of Strange Interlude, who doesn’t care. Why should they come to see this show?
GA: This is really a once-in-a-lifetime experience, to see a nine-act, five-hour show with 600 other people, because there are only three performances and 200 people a show. I think will just be a jaw-droppingly entertaining, horrific, and ultimately fulfilling experience.