For Anne Washburn’s truly postmodern Mr. Burns – A Post-Electric Play, directed by Kirsten Brandt, I wrote the following Dramaturg’s Note and edited the evening program. The study guide is also essential to make sense of the multitude of cultural and artistic references in the play.
Read my interview with the director here.
Dramaturg’s Note: Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play
In her dystopian thought experiment, playwright Anne Washburn explores “what would happen to a pop culture narrative pushed past the fall of civilization.” And fallen indeed is the society she portrays, due to a slow-moving apocalyptic disaster whose origins and exact causes are impossible to fully fathom. One thing is certain: after some serious fires and the gradual interruption of nuclear plants’ regular operations, the lack of electricity has shifted priorities for everyone. Sunlight has regained its importance for activities that require sight. Without cell phones or internet, communications have broken down: news – both good and bad – travel very slow, fraught with uncertainty. Even commonly produced foods and beverages are in short supply and headed to disappearance: by the time of the third act – some eighty-five years after the epochal disaster – chic wines, hot cocoa, or even cheap bubbly sodas exist only as immaterial echoes of a distant past. Of course, appliances like refrigerators and TVs are hopelessly inoperable.
With people fleeing the areas of nuclear pollution or social turmoil, the very fabric of society has broken down: in fact, the failing of the electric grid has brought about the collapse of social networks too, and returned interactions to their “natural” state without the protections of the social contract. New small communities form out of chance and necessity, outsiders could bring in precious pieces of information, maps, or tools, but could also steal or kill: you better watch out! Luckily, guns still work with their old-time mechanisms, and a chill night around a campfire can easily turn into a sudden shoot-out. But what is there to defend? For one, storytelling: it’s stories that provide a way to connect, remember, restore order to the sequence of cause and effect, and ultimately offer a measure of relief from the doom and gloom.
Something else happened after the disaster: in the absence of recognized cultural arbiters, no one can enforce established aesthetic notions. In fact, the playwright seems to suggest a material version of postmodernism: after French theorist Roland Barthes’s famous declaration of the “death of the author” (1967) and the subsequent critical questioning of all authorship/authority in many fields, who’s to say what distinguishes high-brow from low-brow art and culture? Just like, after the barbarian invasions and the Dark Ages in Europe, theatre was reinvented as performative broadening of the Church’s liturgy, Washburn’s literal dark age again recreates the form from scratch. Only, this time it starts from the Simpsons’ TV episodes, themselves a postmodernist pastiche of genres and trove of cultural references. Shakespeare continues too, but somewhere else, not for this group.
It’s theatre and it’s fun to make, but it also must be entertaining: as the author points out, success and audience retention is crucial for these troupes to survive. A whole market of new “lines” for the Simpsons’ characters is created, new forms of authorship develop, and competition creates a whole new genre of Simpsons-inspired shows, even while the characters lose their connection to the cartoon to become “Noble Tropes.” Eventually, electricity starts to come back, at least enough to make theatre spectacular again. In portraying the rebirth of drama from the ashes of our present civilization, Washburn celebrates an art form that proves to be more resilient than many would expect.
