Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (30 Plays in 60 Minutes), the long-running signature show of Chicago’s the Neo-Futurists that we reviewed yesterday, requires each of its performers to be a hybrid of improv artist, actor, athlete, and polemicist. Notwishstanding the fact that the team currently performing the show in the Fringe Festival is 40% female, it also takes some serious balls.

Because although you can rest assured that if a “play” like “1/2 Naked Ninja Pudding Pie” fails to induce asphyxiation-threatening laughter, the problem is yours, not theirs, the Futurists are no mere jokesters. (Each of the show’s segments is a “play” in Neo-Futurist parlance, though they’re seldom longer than a Ramones song.) Several of the plays on the ever-changing menu they’ve brought for their DC run include sharp-elbowed criticism of the Bush administration. But one of them – “26,558” – is literally a showstopper.

For two endless minutes, the five performers flip pages like Dylan in the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video, each page bearing the name of a soldier horribly wounded in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion. The actors recite descriptions of some of the injuries. Needless to say, it’s serious as the grave. It ends with the papers littering the stage, where they stay for the rest of the show.

On Wednesday night, the first of eight local performances was a textbook example of the risks inherent in an unpredictably-sequenced show like this. “26,558” came up seventh in the linep, which meant the soldiers’ names were on the floor for the next 20 plays. The closer turned out to be “Honestly,” wherein the audience fires off yes-or-no questions at one of the actors and is promised a sincere reply. Sharon Greene, who also happens to be the Neo-Futurists’ artistic director, was the interogee that night. The first few questions were softballs, and why not? The show had rocked. They had us.

A woman in the balcony seized the opportunity to ask if the pages always stay on stage for however long the show lasts after “26,558,” meaning the actors trample over them. There were a lot of people shouting questions all at once. Greene had to ask the questioner to repeat herself. When she did, Greene answered, palms upturned, “Yes.”

And then the buzzer ended the show. Saved by the bell, right? Wrong: Greene felt no need to be rescued. She invited the audience to talk with the actors afterward, as is customary for this show, which has been staged in Chicago nearly every weekend since December 1988.

The woman who asked about the names didn’t hang around to talk, but DCist did.

“I actually thought [the woman who asked the question] was being respectful,” Greene says by phone the following day. “She was really inquiring. She had feelings about watching that image unfold.”

That image — papers scattered on the floor — is exactly what Neo-Futurist Kristie Koehler, also performing on the D.C. run, had in mind when she wrote the segment last October. “It was my intention that [the names] remain with us,” Koehler says. “Some people feel it’s irreverent, but it isn’t intended to be. It’s intended to remind us what it means to be in a war like this.” She continues, “the number of [U.S. casualties in Iraq], compared to past wars, it’s not that many. But if you look at the number of wounded, it’s astounding.”

Other members of the troupe asked when Koehler first pitched the play whether they should pick up the pages afterward, Greene recalls, but “Kristie wanted the image lingering.”

The Futurists are an artistic democracy wherein actors can voice objections to plays before they're added to the menu. The performers must be comfortable with the material in order for it to work, Koehler says. Plays deemed to be getting the desired response stay in the show for up to six weeks before they’re rotated out. While the Socratic Method enters into it, so does random chance: An onstage end-of-show dice-roll each night determines how many plays will be replaced in the lineup at the next performance.

The juxtaposition of “26,558” with plays like “One-Minute Competive Candy Necklace Nibble” is obviously jarring: Unless it comes up last, “26,558” followed immediately by another, inevitably sunnier play. (Too Much Light’s lack of time for graceful segues is a key feature of its design.) Because the audience controls the sequence of the show, the cast has no way of knowing when — or indeed, if — its heaviest moment will come. It could be first in the show or at the very end, a possibility Koehler says she hopes doesn’t happen. “If it came at the end, it wouldn’t have as much of an impact. [The names] would fall, and then people would leave.”

Though nothing else stops in the show in its tracks like “26,558” does, other plays have the potential to shape the audience’s perception based on the order in which they appear, says Greene. “Sometimes ‘Ninja’ comes up first, and then people are waiting for the next big musical number.’” Too Much Light's frenetic pace makes it impossible for the actors to worry about what might happen next, but “26,558” is always present in their minds: “It’s waiting to hit [the audience] like a time bomb. We know it’s there, but the audience doesn’t.”

When it comes, it always catches the crowd unawares. But this is what the Neo-Futuirsts do: Adjectives like sincere, genuine, direct, and honest populate their mission statement like chocolate chips in a particularly rich cookie. The word funny is nowhere to be found.

“People are mostly in the room because someone told them we’re the funniest thing they’ve every seen,” Greene says. “But we don’t come out here just to make people applaud. We come out to make them think, and when we see evidence that we’ve done that, it feels like applause to us.”

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (30 Plays in 60 Minutes) has six shows left in its DC run, so get moving.