By Scarlett Hall, Writer
Charles Miller’s take on Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind by Greg Allen is a current rage at Pellissippi State Community College, boasting an interactive experience to multiple sold-out crowds.
While only an hour in length, the show is the culmination of 30 extremely short plays, each lasting anywhere from 10 seconds to 3 minutes. The actors and audience must work together to fight a 60-minute onstage timer by completing all 30 pieces in time, with each piece randomized by audience choice in real time. These unique aspects combine to build a show that creates a hilarious and honest performance; as director Charles Miller stated in a recent exclusive interview,
– “It’s just an hour’s worth of just fun, and almost everybody’s been walking out of the theater with a big smile on their face.”
A Neo-Futurist play that originally opened in 1988, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is the longest running show in Chicago history, pleasing audiences for multiple decades. Having attended the show in Chicago and seeing firsthand how well it resonated with audiences and the actors alike, Miller made the choice to put on this particular show for the semester’s theatre production. Miller says,
“We put a lot of thought into what we choose… What serves our students as well as our department. That’s why this show was chosen… A combination of these things.”
When talking about preparing for this performance, Miller explains what goes into creating an interactive show, and what that looks like.
“There are a couple of times within the play where we work with a volunteer, [and] the audiences shout things out at us. It’s thirty plays in sixty minutes, and the audience gets to choose,” Miller explains.
Since this show is interactive, the randomization of pieces made Miller take a unique approach when directing this piece compared to the average play, as he explains,
“We on the stage management and directing team would say, “We gotta start mixing it up,’ and yell ‘Go! Number __, Go!’… We had a lot of fun that way… A lot of this stuff was teaching students how to learn on the fly. You learn a lot as an actor by just doing it and having audience response.”
When asked if there were any funny moments unique to this type of play, Miller laughed and responded, “More than you can count on any of your fingers and toes.”
The struggle for the theater department to get word out to the students of Pellissippi State has been prominent over the last few years due to both the COVID-19 pandemic and, especially, the 2021 cyber-attack of the college. “It destroyed our theater website, which was the number one means for advertising our program,” says Miller.
On the bright side, the theatre program was finally granted access to a workshop building this past January. Miller says that now that they have a building for the stage crew and construction teams, they should be able to settle from the chaos and be able to advertise more widely and efficiently soon.
In terms of what students can do to support the theatre department, Miller says that showing up to shows is the best thing; Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is a particularly great show for audiences to partake in multiple viewings, as Miller states, “I think if people came back and brought a friend they would enjoy it just as much as the first time. No two shows are the same.”Running this April, every showing of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is a once-in-a-lifetime experience; with audience interaction, randomized play orders, and the honest acting that is required by the show’s crunch time, come out this weekend (4/11-4/13) to support your peers with an hour of laughter. Director Charles Miller’s message to the people is short and sweet: “This isn’t like anything else you are going to see… it’s kinda crazy.”
