A
Neofuturist play put on in
January 2000, written by Neofuturist cast member
Sean Benjamin.
Devolution featured
forty short plays about a man,
E, an
inmate in an
asylum or a
patient in a
mental hospital, who thinks
he's turning into an animal. In the beginning, the
doctor and the
nurse walk across the stage, collide, and the nurse drops and scatters forty
cards with the names of the
forty scenes; the
order in which they were picked up was the order in which the
scenes were performed. It was similar in format to the famous Neofuturist play
Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, which features
thirty short plays in
sixty minutes and has been running since
1988. According to the
Neofuturist website (http://www.neofuturists.org), Devolution was presented again for two weeks at the
Department of Cultural Affairs Storefront Theater in
April 2000.
I saw it in its Chicago run at the Neo-futurarium, and mostly enjoyed it. It wasn't as good as Too Much Light, but I didn't expect it to be. I was a disappointed that it all stayed on the same level and never really went anywhere, but thinking back on it now, you really can't do anything differently when you don't know what order you're going to present the scenes in. Sean Benjamin did a good job as E, although E also stayed on one level the entire time--I didn't really see much Devolution.