Two summers ago Greg Allen started drinking. He’d made it to 40 without having much more than the occasional beer at a party, but now he caroused regularly with a new group of friends, all in their 20s. Walking from a bar to a party he’d yell out, “Midlife crisis!” “They were all very amused,” he says. But Allen was only half joking.
While he was away Allen produced more work than ever before, which is saying something. Though most of the more than 500 plays he estimates he’s written and performed clock in at two minutes or less, he’s one of the most prolific playwright-director-actor-producers in theater. Last year he opened eight shows in nine months, including Evidence, a full-length play inspired by his divorce, at the Chicago troupe’s home in Andersonville, the Neo-Futurarium, and a Brooklyn run of Too Much Light with the first new Neo-Futurist ensemble since 1988. Allen’s kept up a hectic pace this year as well, opening two productions at the Neo-Futurarium and one at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, teaching both here and out of town, and fund-raising for the company. He’s also been negotiating with theaters in Cleveland, Boston, and Seattle about opening new Neo-Futurist franchises.
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Before Allen introduced Too Much Light at Stage Left Theatre on December 2, 1988, he bragged about it to an actor and coworker at Powell’s bookstore, where he was a clerk at the time. He said, “I’m creating a show which will run forever.” The friend replied, “Greg, no show runs forever.” But next year Too Much Light will become the longest-running production in Chicago theater history—and one of the biggest anomalies in show business anywhere. It changes with every performance, yet it’s changed little since opening night. It’s always made up of 30 plays performed in 60 minutes. Audience members still get a name and name tag at the door. The price of admission is always determined by the roll of a die. The audience, then as now, consists mostly of people in their 20s.
In A Small Effort, a 1999 play Allen wrote and performed about this part of his life, a boy stands on the railroad tracks waiting for a train to come along and kill him. As the train approaches, its whistle blowing, he fears “he would not be done away with but instead would suffer horrible injuries which would maim him for life.” The boy steps off the tracks, grows up, and ends up on a stage looking out at an audience. “He wanted to somehow tell them that everything one day will be better,” Allen’s play continued. “He wanted to somehow let them know that things change and it’s OK to feel different, and there is love in the world for them.”
At Oberlin Allen finally took an acting class, mostly as a way to meet girls. When he and Blair Thomas, who’d go on to found Redmoon Theater, took another class on futurism, dadaism, and surrealism, both were knocked out. Thomas directed Allen’s first play, called Angst, about a man and woman clinging to each other in the final moments before the atomic bomb is dropped. “It was god-awful,” Thomas recalls. They became fast friends.
After waiting tables back in Boston for a year, Allen returned to school, this time to the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Center in Waterford, Connecticut, where he took an intensive 14-week training course in writing, acting, and directing. His stage fright subsided, and he decided to give theater another shot. In the mid-80s, there was little question which American city was the best place to start. So Allen came home.
At a Pirandello play Allen presented at a gallery in Evanston, the audience consisted of a few of his friends and ten nonagenarians nodding off on folding chairs. “I said, I’m tired of doing theater for my friends,” he says. “I want to create a show which will run as long as it can and be ever-changing and have an audience that comes back, and all the elements of it will sound alternative and appeal to people who don’t like theater.”
