The infinite Wrench: An ensemble member reflects on the theatre company 'the neo-futurists' during and after Greg Allen's tenure

Connections between historical Futurism and The Neo-Futurist performance ensembles founded by Greg Allen in Chicago in 1988 have always been rather loose. Still, the recent histories of those ensembles illuminate a shift in that relationship, and in particular to The Neo-Futurists' commitment to speed, boldness, and force. This essay examines variations to the performance ensemble's long-running flagship show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, including the 2016 re-tooling of the ensemble's weekly offering of short plays from Too Much Light into The Infinite Wrench. As a member of the New York ensemble who performed intermittently from 2004 to 2016, I recognized key features of the shows that might resonate with imaginaries of Futurism. Those aesthetic qualities - irreverence, dynamism, brevity, unruliness - sometimes had ethical implications, as when the groups' engagement with boldness risked transgressing against audience consent. Ethical concerns also came to the fore when founding director Greg Allen unexpectedly cancelled the Chicago ensemble's rights to perform Too Much Light in 2016, invoking the desire to combat Fascism as a rationale. The ongoing transformation of the performance ensembles hence signals a compelling change in their responses to the preoccupations of Futurism, as their relationship to its legacy continues to mean different things in evolving contexts.