Photo by Kate Hayter Photography
In North America we live in a weird society where art is consumed at a breakneck, voracious speed, and yet it is still treated as though it is expendable. Artists, so often, are seen as folks who are indulgent of their own interests of creation, rather than providing an essential service or commercial product for consumption. In Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a Post Electric Play she suggests that, literally, if an apocalyptic event were to arise and the few remaining humans were left with almost nothing in a ruined, toxic wasteland, stories would be among the few things to survive. DalTheatre‘s production of the play, which closed its sold-out run October 19th, 2024, provides audiences with interesting questions about the resilience of theatre as an art form, and the role that popular culture might play in it.
The play begins a short time in the future and the United States of America, and presumably much of the rest of the world, has been the site of a nuclear holocaust. Six strangers from different states sit around a campfire; they have not been together long, but they are bonded by the fact that they are among the very few survivors of this horrific and traumatic event. These characters are in a state of profound shock and grief and an immense state of not knowing what will happen- even in the immediate future. To cope with this they start to recount an episode of The Simpsons (“Cape Feare”) in attempt to distract and stabilize themselves, and to bring comfort and familiarity into an horrifying unknown.
Matt (played by John Black), Maria (Emily Ayer), and Jenny (Bailey Nash) are vividly recalling, in as much detail as possible, this Simpsons episode- interjecting their own recollections in a friendly and supportive manner. Black is able to do a serviceable impression of some of the characters, which is delightful. Nash’s Jenny is slightly competitive with Matt, wanting to be able to be more or just as precise as he is. Ayer’s Maria isn’t as familiar with the episode, but is wholly engaged nonetheless. It is a testament to the nuanced character acting that we are getting, especially from these three actors, that listening to a Simpsons recap that is longer than the actual episode, is very compelling. Around them Sam, played by Christian Vallis, is patrolling ominously with an old hunting rifle, and Colleen (Mae Rafuse) is too traumatized to engage. Affable Gibson, played with the spirited energy of Jake Wilke, comes upon the group in his own travels and they end up taking advantage of the fact that he has a passion for performing.
From there we move into the future and things get a lot more complicated, but also rife for intellectual thought. For the majority of the next two acts we are watching future actors performing in futuristic productions. The most challenging aspect of this is that the actors are not skilled by today’s standards, which is grating to watch for such a sustained period, but also doesn’t seem rooted in reality. In fact, I found it a bit depressing to suggest that a group of non-actors who had lived in a world wholly immersed by actors and exquisite performances on television and in film for twenty-something years could dedicate themselves to performing in a theatre for seven years, and none of them would ever be good at it. It’s even more soul-sucking, then, to be more than eighty years in the future and to find that, even then, everyone is still performing like the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
There are some acting highlights in Act II: the real-life characters of the director, the much put-upon stage hand, and the agent who brokers the sales of lines in this Elizabethan-adjacent world of competing travelling theatre troupes, with a few different ones trying to recreate The Simpsons live, do a lovely job of bringing in both humour and pathos.
I wanted there to be more of a sense of technology loss and technology change and growth in the lighting and the costumes of the play. Even in the clothing of the director and other real-life characters I found myself musing about what people seven years after a nuclear holocaust would be wearing. Would it all be homemade? Would it have been from the before-times, and looted? How would it be washed and how often; how many different outfits would people have? What about basic hygiene: haircuts, and facial hair? I also think the play would be much more immersive and effective if there were absolutely no electric lights in the theatre space- not even at intermission- and instead we were at the mercy of whatever creative lighting sources the characters are able to rig up.
The third act is very interesting, and I think there are two different, but just as valid, ways of interpreting it, or we can see it as a mix of both. On the one hand The Simpsons musical is like the culmination of an 80 year old game of Telephone. We see the Simpsons episode in question get entirely mangled, and contemporary pop culture kind of put into a bender and mixed together into a kind of reference soup. We can see this as being unintentional, that the characters are trying to recreate what they think The Simpsons was like in an idyllic past world that existed before they were born, but that they have been hearing about in myth since they were children. The other way to look at it is that we are seeing director Dan Bray’s vision for what performance might look like in the future, and that the characters are being innovative, and deliberately using The Simpsons to better make sense of their own terrifying reality. Of course they have turned it into a mutant hellscape, they live, or at least have lived, in a mutant hellscape. In this vision of the musical, there is room to imagine how acting and stage practices might change into something we literally have never seen before. Here we do get a sense of the truly futuristic and the bizarre in the costumes, which is eerie and excellent.
I think I gravitate toward the second vision because as a theatre critic I have and need to have an optimism and also a blind faith in the capacity for humans (whether professionally trained or not) to both make interesting and well executed art, and also, and more importantly, their ability to keep growing, improving, and innovating over time. Obviously I have never experienced the complete wiping out of a theatre community, and hopefully I never will, but especially after the Covid lockdowns, communities are continually rejuvenating, and sometimes that can feel a bit like ‘starting again from square one’ if the community goes rapidly from an older very established demographic to a much younger less experienced one. Thankfully, though, in my experience, it doesn’t stagnant. We all stand on the shoulders of the writers, actors, and directors that have come before us, and I want to believe that, even under unimaginable circumstances, even with just a handful of people, that chain would be unbroken because we live in a weird society where art is consumed at a breakneck and voracious speed, and humans learn a surprising amount through osmosis.
The Fountain School of the Performing Art’s production of Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, at the David Mack Murray Studio Theatre (6101 University Avenue, in the Dal Arts Centre) has closed.
