Mr. Burns, a post-electric play

In a barbaric near-future where the electric grid has gone down for good, a band of survivors huddles around a campfire, retelling an old Simpsons episode. Years go by, and they find small fame as a theatre troupe reenacting old sitcoms, reconstructed wholly from collective human memory. Seventy-five years later, the troupe long gone, we witness a new role thrust upon America’s favorite dysfunctional, four-fingered, yellow family, as the play culminates in an allusion-packed operetta, in equal parts Aeschylus, Gilbert & Sullivan, and vintage turn-of-the-millenium Britney.A smash hit at Playwrights Horizons in 2013, Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a post-electric play spans 80 years, following the Simpsons’ gradual transformation from pop icons we know to the comitragic heroes of a new, orally-transmitted American mythology. Containing digressions both comic and sobering about the last diet cokes in the world, nuclear failure, and the tenacious endurance of commercial capitalism, Mr. Burns takes place in a dark age, but focuses rather on celebrating that which burns eternal—the human urge to share laughter, tears, and stories through theatre.Interested in getting involved? Contact the producer at alexa.derman@yale.edu.