The summer season still has a month to go — with new productions still in the wings — but already the hands-down winner for Most Intriguing and Strange can be named. It’s New Century Theatre’s season closer, Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, a meditation on human resilience, the seduction and dangers of technology, and our need for storytelling, wrapped up in a cheeky riff on an episode of The Simpsons.
The play’s author, Anne Washburn, who specializes in dissecting and deconstructing culture and conventions, was reportedly musing on pop culture when she found herself wondering “what would happen to [it] after a sudden fall of civilization.” The piece is a kind of archaeology-in-reverse, beginning around a campfire where a group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic near-future try to piece together from memory the classic Simpsons episode “Cape Feare,” which itself is a goof on the Martin Scorsese thriller Cape Fear.
Then the playwright jumps forward twice more to trace the trajectory of that story as it insinuates itself into the nascent culture’s DNA. Seven years on, these snippets from the past have become images and catch-phrases of the new present (a lesson in voracious capitalism, among other things) and 75 years later, they’ve evolved into the stuff of mythology and, well, theater. Act Three is a Simpsonized caricature of Greek tragedy via Commedia dell’Arte, complete with character masks, done up as a musical comedy — NCT’s first venture into that territory.
“I love plays that are meant to be theater versus plays that feel more like film or television,” NCT’s Sam Rush told me last week before Mr. Burns opened. The mischievous, but thought-provoking take on a clownish, but thought-provoking TV show is indeed pure theater, inviting its audience to join in an audacious act of imagination. “Theater requires participation from an engaged and listening audience,” continued Rush, who directs this production. “In order to tell a story, you need an active listener.”
In order to understand this particular story, by the way, it’s not necessary to be familiar with The Simpsons or the particular episode it references, though the active listener who’s also a fan will pick up on the many parallels and references threaded through the sometimes elliptical dialogue. By picking through this artifact of a half-remembered lost civilization — in this case, a satirical animated cartoon about the definitively dysfunctional all-American family — Washburn’s characters reconstruct the invention of culture and the act of making art.
The show premiered in 2012, and has quickly become one of the hottest tickets on professional stages nationwide. The New York Times’ critic called it “downright brilliant … an intoxicating and sobering vision of an American future.” The cast in NCT’s production features a roster of talent familiar from previous outings here, including David Mason, Stephanie Carlson, Lynnette Freeman, Brianne Beatrice, Kyle Boatwright, Aimee Doherty, Paul Melendy, and Sam Samuels.•
Through Aug. 8 at New Century Theatre, Mendenhall Center, Smith College, Northampton, 585-3220, newcenturytheatre.org.
Chris Rohmann is at StageStruck@crocker.com and valleyadvocate.com/author/chris-rohmann
