Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play

Written by Anne Washburn. Directed by Mitchell Cushman and Simon Bloom. Until June 7 at 1035 Gerrard St. E. OutsideTheMarch.ca

If, God forbid, civilization should crumble someday soon and only a handful of theatrical texts survive, please let one of them be a play about how The Simpsons will be the only cultural text to survive the inevitable crumbling of civilization.

If nothing else, 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.

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Washburn’s 2012 postapocalyptic tale is big, bold, weird, charming, funny, sad and, most of all, smart (S-M-R-T!). In three acts, she covers topics like survival skills, group politics, friendship, family, love, trauma, fear, religion, capitalism, and the purpose of art and storytelling. Plus enough Simpsons jokes to make any fan squeal and enough misquotes to make them cringe.

But first, there’s a story. Months before the play begins, the world has lost its electricity, sending its nuclear power plants into meltdown mode. Cities are empty, families are scattered, resources are scarce. One of the travellers we meet in the first act, Matt (Colin Doyle) has The Walking Dead across his T-shirt, but the similarity is easy enough to find without that prompt.

Matt is a semi-authoritative figure in his ragtag group since he can best recall episodes of The Simpsons, which they do to pass the time, but also as a grip on the nostalgic comforts of the recent past. This time it’s “Cape Feare,” where Sideshow Bob threatens Bart’s life and the Simpsons relocate to Terror Lake. Matt, Jenny (Tracy Michailidis) and Maria (Katherine Cullen) get the main story line and a few key jokes when a stranger named Gibson (Damien Atkins) arrives to fill in some of the missing pieces.

The next act revisits the same group seven years later, after they’ve turned their campfire TV stories into gritty indie theatre productions, commercials and pop music interludes included, which they tour to several small towns. It’s a competitive industry, and rival companies are dying out or eating up the resources. And even though work has become the distraction from trauma that the characters’ fireside tales used to be, the atmosphere of fear and threat and annihilation never goes away.

Finally, the third act brings us 75 years after the meltdowns with what the staging of this Simpsons episode has evolved into: an epic musical involving elements of Greek chorus, giant puppetry, pop and classical music, and glow-in-the-dark lighting. It’s here where the play shows its one weakness in the script and in the production, but thematically finishes strong.

It’s impossible to unpack all the layers in Washburn’s play here, from the perfect choice of The Simpsons as the surviving vestige of today’s pop culture (it itself contains references to decades of texts), to its commentary on the corrupting influence of a capitalistic society, to the way generations exchange references as a means of establishing status or forming bonds, to the myriad apocalyptic tales that today’s TV, movies, books and theatre seem to obsess over.

Co-directors Mitchell Cushman and Simon Bloom subtly bring out all of these layers and more, and add their own.

Taking the title of “a Post-Electric Play” literally, the production is off the grid: flashlights and lanterns light the show, and sound effects are provided by live crickets and hand-cranked record players. The design team deserves a lot of recognition here: set designer Ken MacKenzie, costume designer Lindsay Junkin, lighting designer Nick Blais, sound designer Samuel Sholdice and puppet designer Marcus Jamin. The show is ambitious and stunning, if at points a little too clever for its own good.

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In the final act, Cushman and Bloom pull out all the stops, and since their company Outside the March is already known for inventive productions with lots of theatrical surprises, this is really saying something.

Sometimes it’s genius (did we say live crickets?), but the loudspeaker/puppetry/back light/over-the-top musical begins to verge on the unwatchable, saved for the standout performance of Rielle Braid as the unlikely hero, Bart Simpson. But just because it’s esthetically overwhelming with needlessly drawn-out fight sequences doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense in the world — is it the result of the next generation’s relative abundance of resources at play? Or their reacceptance of social status and we’re witnessing the latest Broadway blockbuster?

None of these interpretations would be wrong. Because in Anne Washburn’s world, “everything has meaning.”