Apocalypse Masque: Post-Electric Theatricality inMr. Burns

Abstract

How does a society survive through its stories, after the death of the technologies that embodied those narratives? This is the question that drives Anne Washburn’s 2012 play Mr. Burns. She posits a landscape in apocalyptic shadow, a post-electric New England where the power plants have failed and wanderers gather around campfires to trade lists of lost loved ones and whatever tales they can remember from the defunct world of television. Over the course of three acts, a single episode from The Simpsons becomes a bardic solace for a fractured society, then (a few years later, when troupes are paid to perform fading episodes from the show) an economic structure through which hope and nostalgia are exchanged, and, finally, in the distant future, a fully ritual theatre in which its previous purposes have attained a religious level of abstraction. Washburn’s concern is thus the way intertextual weaving and viral reproduction—starting with The Simpsons’s own mélange of borrowings from sources as distant as classic cinema and Victorian musicals—serve a post-truth society without access to exact mechanical modes of replication and transmission, preserving a text and the history it carries even through the process of mutation.