Half Li(v)es includes texts from Loomis’ provocative multi-media solo theater pieces (including the award-winning Female Deviations), performance poetry and short plays from the show Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. 
The sixty-page amalgam spans topics and writing styles, with everything from lesbian erotic fiction to monologues on murder to poetry about bees. Loomis, who received an Artist Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council in 2000, says, “People often ask me for copies of the scripts so I decided to pull together writings that I’ve performed over my ten years here in Chicago. I wanted the book to be something other than an attempt to document live performances so I chose material that I feel works on the page as well as the stage.”

Half Li(v)es

Literature & Fiction

Loomis, Anita

United States

Hope And Nonthings

This collection of 200 short (very short) plays from The Neo-Futurists acclaimed cult hit "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind" is the third collection from this prolific group of theater artists. (100 Neo-Futurist Plays, Chicago Plays, 1991 and Neo-Solo: 131 Neo-Futurist Solo Plays, Hope and Nonthings, 2002.) "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind," created by Greg Allen, debuted in Chicago in December, 1988, and has been playing to sold out houses ever since. The show presents 30 plays in 60 minutes, 50 weeks a year, to a devoted following. The ensemble of writer-performers generates between 2 and 12 new plays each week, as dictated by a roll of the dice, creating a constantly changing menu of plays. The material runs the gamut of style, tone, and topic: musical, confession, agit-prop, poetic gesture, physical comedy, puppet theater, audience interrogation, folk song, sex joke, and many more. The plays are funny, moving, challenging, powerful, and occasionally just plain weird, but all within The Neo-Futurists' trademark non-illusory aesthetic. There is no "fourth wall" in "Too Much Light" — the show embraces the ideal that theater is created in the connection between audience and performer, in the two-way exchange of ideas, emotions, and energy, and in an honest exploration of everyday life. Randomness, dynamism, speed, brevity, and planned obsolescence are celebrated and exploited to engage and refresh participants on both sides of the theatrical equation. The 200 plays in this volume reflect the diversity of 27 ensemble members and the multiplicity of viewpoints and voices they bring to the stage. The plays stand as an entertaining document of some of the show's output from 1993 to 2002 history as well as ideal material for actor scene study, auditions, and competition presentations.

200 More Neo-Futurist Plays: from Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (30 Plays in 60 Minutes)

The Neo-Futurists

Dramas & Plays

Two plays by Chicago playwright Mickle Maher. "An Apology..." is a brilliant retelling of the Faust legend. Dr. John Faustus apologizes to the audience for leaving the writing of his life to "long-winded hacks" and explains how Mephistopheles prevented him from recording his own story for posterity. In "The Hunchback Variations" Maher brings together composer Ludwig van Beethoven and Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, for a panel discussion on the pitfalls of artistic collaboration. Their attempts to create an enigmatic sound called for by a stage direction in Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" are thwarted by their deafness, unpleasant working conditions, and the fact that Beethoven has not yet finished reading the "The Cherry Orchard." Two funny, intelligent and highly original two-character plays.

An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening and The Hunchback Variations

Maher, Mickle

Weasels In A Box (a not so musical journey through partially truthful situations with eighty percent fictitious dialogue) is a meta-fictional novel that dances dangerously close to the edge of historical pop punk reality. It embodies the confusion felt by a specific pop-punk semi-famous rockstar of the mid 90's from the band Screeching Weasel who questions the importance of his era and ultimately the importance of himself. How does this affect his life today? What fictions was he constantly creating because of his subjectivity and inability to remember accurate conversations and situations? What is Fame and how does it differ from Success?

Weasels in a Box: a not so musical journey through partially truthful situations with eighty percent fictitious dialogue

Pierson, John Jughead

Literary

The first book collection of work by Chicago-based writer, performer, and "surrealist insomniac mystic" Dave Awl, gathers a selections from decade and a half of poems; stories and monologues from The Pansy Kings' Cotillion, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, Talking to Myself, and other shows; and the 1997 online chapbook Night Diaries.

What the Sea Means: Poems, Stories & Monologues

Awl, Dave

Poetry

Neo-Solo: 131 Neo-Futurist Solo Plays from Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is the second book of short (very short) plays from Chicago's experimental theater company, The Neo-Futurists. Too Much Light is an on-going attempt to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes. The show is in constant flux, with at least 2 to 12 new plays written by the ensemble each week. Since the show's inception in 1988, the ensemble has generated nearly 4,500 short plays, performance pieces, and monologues, from which this collection is culled. The book contains solo performance pieces by 25 authors, covering such diverse topics as racial politics, sex between strangers, child abuse, and what it means to be a "male secretary". Rants, poems, songs, plays without words, straight-ahead monologues, jokes and audience participatory plays are just a few of the forms used by The Neo-Futurists to present their ideas and stories.

Neo-Solo: 131 Neo-Futurist Solo Plays: from Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (30 Plays in 60 Minutes)

I, A-Meist is the first compilation of Mykel Board's Columns for Maximum Rock N Roll, the monthly bible of the international underground punk community. 53 Columns from 1985 to 2000.

I A, Me-ist: or The Portable Board

Arts & Photography

Board, Mykel

Music

The Strangerer is a masterful satire, crossing the writings of Albert Camus and Edward Albee with the 2004 presidential debate between George Bush and John Kerry in Miami's convocation center. Spirits To Enforce is a meta-adaptation of The Tempest with 12 Absurd Superheroes on 12 different phones collecting funds for their stage adaptation of The Tempest.

The Strangerer and Spirits To Enforce ( two plays )

Mickle Maher

This book brings together over 200 short (very short) plays from the New York production of the acclaimed cult theater hit "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind." "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind," created by Greg Allen, debuted in Chicago in December, 1988, and has been playing to sold out houses ever since. The show presents 30 plays in 60 minutes, 50 weeks a year, to a devoted following. The ensemble of writer-performers generates between two and 12 new plays each week, as dictated by a roll of the dice, creating a constantly changing menu of plays. In 2004, a New York ensemble was formed and the show has been running there since, playing to houses of younger, culturally adventurous audiences as well as seasoned theater-goers. The 225 plays in this volume, culled from more than 1,300 the New York company has generated since 2004, reflect the diversity of 35 current and past ensemble members and the multiplicity of viewpoints and voices they bring to the stage. The material runs the gamut of style, tone, and topic: musical, confession, agit-prop, poetic gesture, physical comedy, puppet theater, audience interrogation, folk song, sex joke, and many more.

225 Plays: By The New York Neo-Futurists from Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind

The New York Neo-Futurists

More If You’ve Got It brings together five full-length plays from Chicago's acclaimed Theater Oobleck. This collection features works by five founding members, each currently active with the company: Ugly’s First World by Jeff Dorchen, in which a singing zombie, seeking revenge against T. S. Eliot, becomes a pawn in a battle to overthrow God; Innocence and Other Vices by Dave Buchen, a half-true, half-blasphemous screwball comedy about the mildly unhealthy relationship between charity and capitalism; Letter Purloined by David Isaacson, a whodunit comedy about war atrocities and a handkerchief; There Is a Happiness That Morning Is by Mickle Maher, a play in rhymed verse, about the poetry of William Blake and having sex in public; and Necessity by Danny Thompson, a bloody and historically inaccurate bio-drama of Thomas Alva Edison. See what audiences around the world have come to know as uniquely Oobleckian: irreverent, vexed, impossibly funny, and unexpectedly transcendent.

More If You've Got It: Five Plays from Theater Oobleck

Buchen, Dave

Isaacson, David

Dorchen, Jeffrey

Thompson, Danny

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