Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play

Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play
The poster for the original off-Broadway production at Playwrights Horizons
Written by	Anne Washburn
Date premiered	May 2012
Place premiered	Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington, D.C.
Genre	Dark comedy

Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (officially stylized Mr. Burns, a post-electric play) is an American dark comedy play written by Anne Washburn. It premiered in May 2012 at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., and then ran from August through October 2013 at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. 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. It received polarized reviews and was nominated for a 2014 Drama League Award for Outstanding Production of a Broadway or Off-Broadway Play.

Shortly after an unspecified apocalyptic event, a group of survivors gather together and begin to attempt to recount the episode "Cape Feare" of the television show The Simpsons. The second act picks up with the same group seven years later, who have now formed a theatrical troupe that specializes in performing Simpsons episodes, with commercials and all. The final act is set an additional 75 years in the future. The same episode of The Simpsons, now a familiar myth, has been reworked into a musical pageant, with the story, characters, and morals repurposed to fit the artistic and dramatic needs of a culture still reeling from destruction of civilization and the near-extinction of humanity decades earlier.

Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play was written by Anne Washburn. For a long time, she 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" and while she originally considered Friends, Cheers, and M*A*S*H, she ultimately settled on The Simpsons. 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, including Matthew Maher, Maria Dizzia, and Jennifer R. Morris, could remember. Maher knew The Simpsons well and the group decided on the 1993 episode "Cape Feare", based on the 1991 film Cape Fear, itself a remake of an eponymous 1962 film which is based on the 1957 novel The Executioners. He helped Dizzia and Morris remember the episode, then the two of them went on to perform it for an audience without his help; Washburn subsequently utilized recordings of this process in writing her play's first act.