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.