About
the Play:
Mr. Burns, a post-electric play is a full-length dark
comedy by Anne Washburn. What will endure after the collapse
of civilization – when the electrical grid fails, society crumbles,
and we're faced with the task of rebuilding? A challenging yet
thoughtful and accessible play, Mr. Burns takes place shortly
after an apocalyptic event, where an episode of The Simpsons holds
the key to cultural preservation. This volume also contains 10 Out
of 12, The Small and I Have Loved Strangers.
Mr. Burns propels us forward nearly a century, following a
new civilization stumbling into its future. Armageddon has struck and
the electrical grid is down: no TV, no radio, no internet – how
will life go on? One group of tenacious survivors is huddled around a
fire, pondering the world without electricity, and the things they
will never see again. To console themselves, they piece together the
plot of "The Simpsons" episode "Cape Feare"
entirely from memory. 7 years later, this and other snippets of pop
culture (sitcom plots, commercials, jingles, and pop songs) have
become the live entertainment performed by travelling theatre
troupes, while remembered lines are traded back and forth like
currency. 75 years later, these are the myths and legends from which
new forms of performance are created. A paean to live theatre, and
the resilience of Bart Simpson through the ages, Mr. Burns is
an animated exploration of how the pop culture of one era might
evolve into the mythology of another.
Mr. Burns premiered in 2012 at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre
Company in Washington, DC. Since
then the play ran at Playwrights Horizons in 2013 and at the Almeida
Theatre in London in 2014, had regional premieres at professional
theatres across the US, UK,
and has been mounted by community theatres and
is regularly performed in high school and college theatre productions as a showcase
of student talent.
Cast: 5 women, 3 men
What people say:
"Anne Washburn's
Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play
is an astonishing master class in playwriting. Future scribes
would benefit in having it as an example, not to emulate exactly, but
as proof that a (future) classic can exist outside the 'well-made
play' formula." — The Toronto Star
"Mr. Burns is so
smart it makes your head spin… Downright brilliant. This
intoxicating and sobering vision of an American future, set during a
day-after tomorrow apocalypse…has depths of feeling to match its
breadth of imagination… In tracing a story's hold on the
imaginations of different generations, the play is likely to make you
think back—way back—to narratives that survive today from
millenniums ago… With grand assurance and artistry, Ms. Washburn
makes us appreciate anew the profound value of storytelling in and of
itself… Makes a case for theater as the most glorious and durable
storyteller of all. I look forward to remembering it for a long, long
time." — New York Times
"...an intellectual rush, a
sense of unexplored theatrical possibility... and the massive pull of
shared experience." — The Chicago Tribune
"Mr. Burns is
both scary and sweet, funny but dead serious, unique and wonderfully
theatrical." — TIME Magazine
"Get in line ASAP. This
bizarre, funny, bleak, wonderful show is even better than its hype."
— New York Post
"Gradually this absurd, unreal
performance comes to encapsulate not just the old, now-mythical way
of life but also our own. The intellectual fascination of the
material meshes with emotional significance on an instinctual level."
— Financial Times
"If you’re a fan of The
Simpsons with an appetite for risk-taking theatre, its strangeness
will be irresistible." — Evening Standard
About the Playwright:
Anne Washburn is an American playwright. Her work has been
produced Off-Broadway and in regional
theatres in the US and Canada, and in Europe and
Australia. She holds a B.A. in theater and literature from Reed
College and an M.F.A. from New York University. She has held several
MacDowell and Yaddo residencies between 2008 and 2013, was a 2009
Guggenheim fellow, and received a PEN/Laura Pels Award in 2015.