adam smith
Stage
The
Neo-Futurists
Neo-Futurism
I'm an alumni of the award-winning New York Neo-Futurists (2008 - 2012) and the founding artistic director of the San Francisco Neo-Futurists (2013-2018). The Neo-Futurists are anti-pretenders: no characters, no false sets, no suspension of disbelief. Their primary show, The Infinite Wrench (formerly Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind), is a mad-cap dash to perform 30 original plays in one hour -- in an order determined by a rowdy, screaming audience. You just have to see it, ok?
Over the course of nearly 10 active years (and occasional guest runs these days), I've written and directed several hundred short plays. You can read most of them here.
Play about a Woman
This is a play about someone in the audience. We don't know who she is yet, but we're certain she showed up. Play about a Woman is a comedic blend of absurdism, documentary, immersive theater to create something unique every performance.
“Sly, wryly whimsical” – Robert Hurwitt for SF Chronicle
“I won’t bury the lede–this show is brilliant… [Play about a Woman] manages to do what theatre so rarely manages to do, and that is to be constantly surprising.” – Amanda Berg Wilson for ALOC Media
“A brilliantly deconstructed piece of comedic theatre. Smith takes a risk at every performance” – Jo Tomalin for FringeReview.co.uk
Good Strong Hands
A multi-disciplinary study on presence and absence; the ephemeral and material; cats lost in the woods. Arletta Anderson & I collaborated with Eric Garcia and Melissa Lewis to deconstruct the ongoing concert between permanence and impermanence.
Inspired by the philosophy of Derrida and the science behind how the brain fills in gaps of information, Good Strong Hands blends personal narrative, humor, and abstraction. The experience of absence is both questioned and celebrated through spoken word, live sound and music, task, and dance. See more of our dance/theater work at andersmith.co
Solo Play for One Man
A man enters from upstage left. He walks downstage right. He runs back to upstage left and starts again.
The narrator describes the man and his life. He is generic, he is specific, handsome, forgettable -- the embodiment of every mediocre leading man our culture obsesses over. A man who simply has the luck of showing up and not going home.
Willie Caldwell and I initially wrote this comedy as a dare to see if we could keep an audience's attention in spite of the perpetual repetition of the stage action.
The video here is a 15-minute iteration that was performed at Stomping Ground LA in 2023 -- and you'll notice the microphone quit, so I just yell the whole play from the back of the house. Ahh, theatre.