By J. Scott Hill

Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

That’s the inscription on the gates of Hell, at least according to Dante.  Many among us have already abandoned hope and are trapped in a living Hell thanks to our current or former employers’ embrace of the root of all evil, the love of money. But the recession is allegedly over.  Corporate profits are way up.  The Stock Market is way up.  The economy is getting better for those who already have money, lots of money.  The bottom ninety-eight percent of us are still feeling the pinch, if the drop of the guillotine can be called a mere pinch.  Unemployed, underemployed, multiple jobs, no benefits, no prospects on the horizon, if we aren’t experiencing it right now, we fear it could happen to us tomorrow.  Economists and other pundits may see prosperity ahead, but the rest of us are in crisis.

When will we find relief?

Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m.

The Neo-Futurists can help.  For what you spend every week on that pipe dream of winning the lotto, you can gain entry into a world of stress-relieving entertainment: comedy, live music, singing, dancing, magic, short film, and challenging games.  If you are smart, lucky, and above all honest, you have a shot at winning some serious cash.

If you would like to be a contestant in CRISIS, show up a half-hour early and take the Scantron test.  Overhead projectors shine multiple-choice questions onto the walls and ceiling just like in eighth grade.  Don’t forget to answer the essay question; it will require you to state truthfully what may be a deeply personal story.

For eight contestants each night, CRISIS is a two-hour climb up the corporate ladder.  In the fantasy world of CRISIS, honesty and intelligence (rather than booty-smooching and mediocrity) lead to promotion.  The game itself has three tiers: Ground Zero, The Panic Room, and The Breaking Point.

During Ground Zero, contestants are broken into two teams and managed through a series of Family Feud-type questions by host Meister Lovegeldt, played by John Pierson with even more than his usual undeniable charm.  Pierson flings himself at this enterprise like a trebuchet flings pumpkins at the annual Pumpkin Chunkin’ down in Morton; the energy tapped leaves the audience in awe.  Like many an entry-level manager, Pierson works magic – in this case a set of classic tricks popularized on the TV variety shows of a bygone era.  Pierson’s entire performance is a throwback to the days when entertainers were first and foremost onstage to entertain – refreshing.

The team that survives Ground Zero is promoted to The Panic Room.  Host Mark E. Valli is tricksy and frenetic.  Dan Kerr-Hobert plays The Panic Room’s host as an oily mid-level manager: contestants start with as much credit as they are going to get from Valli, and he deducts points for every wrong answer and unwon challenge.  Kerr-Hobert’s song-and-dance number is a delight.

The contestant that keeps their cool in The Panic Room earns a sit-down with the CEO.  Round three is The Breaking Point, and CEO Clifton Frei probes the remaining contestant Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?-style.  In addition to increasingly more difficult, increasingly more valuable questions, the CEO has no compunctions about asking the contestant to give public answers to questions about normally private matters.  The audience is informally polled about the verisimilitude and completeness of these answers, and money is awarded or not, accordingly.  When digging through the contestant’s tender memories, Frei is no Regis Philbin, no blurter nor brute; he shifts instantaneously and effortlessly from bombastic to therapeutic.

The action is interspersed with clever and hilarious “executive client videos” (used in game play) and live commercials for local businesses.  These scenes change from night to night.  Present and former Neo-Futurists, as well as other prominent Chicago actors, will be performing in these interstitial scenes.

CRISIS (A Musical Game Show) is wild fun to watch, and the contestants seem to be having even more fun than the audience is.  The winner can walk away with up to a third of that night’s box office, over five hundred bucks if the show is sold out. The performances are geared toward nothing more profound than making mirth for the downtrodden, which nowadays is all of us.  Pierson, Kerr-Hobert, Frei, and the rest of the cast and crew work fervently to try to re-instill a little hope in our lives, not through some heartwarming success story or platitudes that things are getting better, but by entertaining us with abandon.

3 STARS


(“CRISIS (A Musical Game Show)” runs Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays through June 12* at The Neo-Futurarium, 5153 N. Ashland, Chicago. 773-275-5255.)

*The June 11 and June 12 performances are Champion Rounds.

Neo-Futurists

CRISIS (A Musical Game Show) production photos by Evan Hanover.

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