Greg Allen In the face of so many other Neo-Futurists' web bios which are fun and creative and make you think they are the coolest people in the world, Greg just offers a rather traditional bio below. He really is some of those things but every now and then he feels a need to look professional: Greg Allen is the Founding Director of The Neo-Futurists and creator ofToo Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind (30 Plays in 60 Minutes). He has written, directed, and performed more than 500 original plays for Too Much Light... in its continuous run since it opened December 2, 1988 - from Another Play Which Makes The Audience Hate Greg to the imfamous Title. He has also written and/or directed twenty full-length productions for The Neo-Futurists for their prime-time seasons including Lear's Shadow, Seventy Scenes of Halloween by Jeffrey Jones, True Dreams of Annie Arbor by John Roberts, and The Neo-Futurist Revenger's Tragedy. K., his adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial, won him an After Dark Award for Outstanding New Work in Chicago in 1996, and the Best Director Award at the New York International Fringe Theater Festival in 1997. He wrote, devised and performed two highly regarded two-man shows with Connor Kalista in 1998 and 1999: Crime and Punishment: A (mis)Guided Environmental Tour With Literary Pretensions and Boxing Joseph Cornell, the second of which was commissioned and remounted for the Chicago Arts Club. Greg's solo performance piece, My Father, The Chair, has been presented at seven different performance festivals across the country. His collaboration with Theater Oobleck's Danny Thompson and Ben Schneider, The Complete Lost Works Of Samuel Beckett As Found In An Envelope (partially burned) In A Dustbin In Paris Labeled "Never to be performed. Never. Ever. EVER! Or I'll Sue! I'LL SUE FROM THE GRAVE!!!, premiered at the 1999 Rhino Festival in Chicago, was remounted for a winter run at the Lunar Cabaret, played in a barn in Vermont for a week, won the Outstanding Production Award for Comedy during its sold-out run in the New York International Fringe Theater Festival in the summer of 2000, and later returned to NYC for a very successful run at the Present Company on the Lower East Side in early 2001. The show that will never die, The Complete Lost Works... then won rave reviews and sold out every performance, added five more, and sold those out at the 2002 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The show was then picked up for a three month UK tour in 2003 starting with a six week run at Riverside Studios, London, (an old haunt of Beckett himself) and then moved on to Dublin, Belfast, Brighton, and elsewhere. From time to time, it seems various versions of it (Greg has had to replace himself as a performer since the second in New York) seem to crop up around the country as recently as 2004. In November of 2000, Greg wrote, directed, and performed Jokes and Their Relation To The Unconscious, the show which promised to put the final nail in the coffin of comedy by analyzing it to death. After its initial extended ten week run in the winter of 2000/2001, Jokes was remounted for a commissioned, sold-out run in the summer to 2001 which was filmed by a Portland, Oregon-based film company. The video of the show was released in November of 2001 and is available at your local video store. He followed this up with writing and directing a show called H20, a nearly-wordless waltz which explored all the glorious agony and hideous ecstacy of love. After filling the stage with words in the lecture demonstration oriented Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Greg thought he would work primarily with images, so this "nightmare comedy" explored human relationships through slides, movement, music from the 1930s and '50's, fire, and lots and lots of water. Called a "small masterpiece" by The Chicago Tribune, H20 won him the greatest critical praise of his career to date. Greg was also commissioned to write "phone plays" for the 2001 Humana Festival at The Actors Theatre of Louisville. His play Subliminable was chosen for production and was published in their annual anthology of festival plays. Greg then returned to the Actors Theatre of Louisville in January of 2002 to teach Neo-Futurism to the resident apprentices. He has been teaching Neo-Futurist Performance Workshops in Chicago with his teaching partner Karen Christopher from Goat Island for over a decade and was a professor of theater history at Columbia College for five years. Greg still teaches classes in Neo-Futurism at the University of Chicago, Roosevelt University, the Associated Colleges of the Midwest Chicago Semester in the Arts Program, and various other schools. In 2002 Greg created a staged adaptation of a horrendously wonderful Spaghetti Western called Django with an all gay cast, made his Steppenwolf Theater debut by performing his piece The Grapes of Kahn (holding forth on the sin of wrath in dance and spew), and performed at the closing celebration of the Lunar Cabaret. In 2003 he embarked on the Herculian task of producing and directing eight shows in nine months. He devised and performed a piece with John Pierson inspired by the life and methodology of Marcel Duchamp called A Duchampian Romp, even, The Complete Lost Works... on its three month UK tour, The Grapes of Khan with Performing Arts Chicago, an updated version of H20 at Theater on the Lake, A Hundred Boats Sinking Except One created with Nicole Burgund for the Chicago Improv Festival, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious at the New York International Fringe Festival, and his dumb group-solo piece I Don't Drink in the Rhinoceros Theater Festival, as well as performing in Too Much Light.... After a rest at the end of year, Greg decided to narrow his scope in 2004 by opening two shows in two cities in two weeks. His latest script evidence opened March 18th at The Neo-Futurarium and was highly recommended and called "brilliant" in The Chicago Reader. Asking "What is love in the time of Bush?" and "How do we draw objective conclusions in a subjective world?", the play draws from such diverse sources as the Kenneth Starr Report, Capturing The Friedmans, and Greg's own divorce proceedings to create a pitch black nightmare comedy of cross-examination and coercion. At the end of the month, Greg then departed for Brooklyn to open a new ongoing branch of Too Much Light... at the Brooklyn Lyceum. After months of preparations, including 150 auditions and a two week intensive workshop with 22 New Yorkers, ten incredibly talented artists were chosen to create this new ensemble. The Brooklyn Neo-Futurists perform in the mold of the Chicago company, creating new works every week to be performed late-night Fridays and Saturdays at 11:30pm, 50 weeks a year. Now you can catch Too Much Light... in two cities! Greg hopes to direct a staged reading in the annual It Came From The Neo-Futurarium series of bad films in the summer of 2004, revisit A Hundred Boats Sinking Except One with Nicole Burgund, start a kid-friendly version of Too Much Light... in November (the true focus of his life being his two children, the amazing Noah and Simone!), and for the 2004-2005 prime-time season will create his next big show: The Last Two Minutes of the Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen. A rest doesn't look imminent.