The Cat in the Cream got a healthy dose of audience participation last Saturday, when Chicago-based comedy troupe the Neo-Futurists came to visit Oberlin — the alma mater of founding member Greg Allen, OC ’84.

Although Allen didn’t admit it until the end, their show, “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,” was written for someone with typical Obie sensibilities and an Oberlin sense of humor. According to Allen, this student body is “who the show is ultimately aimed at.”

At 8 p.m., when the program was supposed to start, the crowd was still crawling over one another to get to distant but vacant seats. The numbers one through 30 were strung up on a clothesline hung high over the stage. To the right of the stage, a darkroom timer sat unobtrusively, and a few small props were scattered across the piano on the left.

“The goal of this show is to beat the clock,” said Allen, describing their program as an “ever-changing attempt to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes.”

The audience members all fingered their programs in anticipation as Allen explained that at the cue word, “curtain,” which marked a segment’s end, they were responsible for choosing the next play. Troupe members Jessica Anne, Sharon Greene, Chloe Johnston and Ryan Walters initiated several test “curtains” to make sure that the audience fully grasped the concept.

The plays ranged from almost incomprehensibly ridiculous to heartfelt and almost too serious to be funny. The Neo-Futurists add plays after each week of performance according to the roll of two dice, so anywhere from two to 12 plays are added to their repertoire each week.

In performance, the troupe has to be able to switch from silly to serious in seconds — from audience members taking part in a candy necklace eating contest (“30 Second Competitive Candy Necklace Nibble”) to a piece on long distance relationships where two actors shout across the length of the Cat to one another (“Replay of a Long Distance Relationship”).

The crowd was kept on its toes, one moment bombarded with tortillas in “Night of the Wild Tortilla Throwers,” and the next watching a child-craving lesbian pry into a friend’s personal life in hope of healthy sperm in “Lesbians, Subtle But not Subtle Enough.”

One of the group’s longer, more in-depth shorts was “The Wheels on the Bus,” which follows the train of thought of a person daydreaming in a stopped bus. The character imagines that they never leave the bus, that they build a community around it, that they experience moments like “seeing the first bus-baby go off to college.” Then, the bus moves again and the play abruptly ends.

Within their self-designated time limit, the Neo-Futurists managed to put together a collage of mini plays that entertained the audience. This is not the group’s first visit to campus, and it is certain that they will be welcome here again the next time they take a trip east.