s

News

City Acting Amateur Theatre based on Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns

City Acting Amateur Theatre course will be starting for 10 weeks in Angel in October. This new edition will be based on Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play.

Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play is an American dark comedy play written by Anne Washburn premiered in May 2012 at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. Mr. Burns tells the story of a group of survivors recalling and retelling ‘Cape Feare’, an episode of the TV show The Simpsons, shortly after a global catastrophe, then examines the way the story has changed seven years after that, and finally, 75 years later.

For a long time, Anne Washburn had been exploring what it would be like "to take a TV show and push it past the apocalypse and see what happened to it" Washburn held a workshop for a week in a bank vault beneath Wall Street which was being used as a shared rehearsal space in 2008 to see how much of any episode of The Simpsons the actors she had assembled could remember. The group decided on the 1993 episode "Cape Feare", based on the 1991 film Cape Fear. Washburn subsequently utilized recordings of this process in writing her play's first act.

Julie Grossman examined Mr. Burns as an instance of multilayered adaptation. She wrote that the show "challenges audiences to embrace the imaginative (if strange and alienating) scions, or adaptations, of cultural matter." In reference to characters in the play's second act bargaining for rights to and lines from other Simpsons episodes, she noted "That permissions and copyright have survived the apocalypse brings out the absurdity of owning the rights to artistic production and dialogue and the persistence of capitalism." "Although the play's postmodern mash-up of television, film, and theater is highly entertaining, its powerful ethics resides in seeing capitalism and consumerism (symbolized by the greedy Simpsons character Mr. Burns) as the causes of civilization's decay.