D’oh! The World Ends, “The Simpsons” Bumble On

In a famously dark 1993 episode of “The Simpsons,” the family enters witness protection after Bart’s murderous nemesis, the clown Sideshow Bob, is released from prison and vows revenge. Titled “Cape Feare,” it parodies the 1991 Martin Scorsese-directed thriller and ranks among the most celebrated installments of the long-running Fox series.

It’s also the perhaps unlikely centerpiece of an acclaimed work of theater, which will be presented at the University of Maryland beginning Friday. 

Anne Washburn’s black comedy “Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play” imagines a future for “Cape Feare” — and popular culture more broadly — after a catastrophe destroys the electrical grid and upends civilization. The three-act play spans more than 80 years: First, a group of survivors tries to reconstruct the episode from memory around a fire. Seven years later, they have formed a theater troupe that performs remembered episodes of “The Simpsons” and other remnants of pop culture. By the final act, decades later, “Cape Feare” has been retold and reshaped so many times that the story has an entirely new meaning. 

The School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS) will stage “Mr. Burns” through Oct. 18 at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, directed by Elizabeth Dinkova, artistic director of the Spooky Action Theater in Washington, D.C. The Bulgarian-born, Yale-trained director, adaptor and collaborative creator talked about what drew her to the play, the challenge of creating a world without electricity and what happens to the stories we love when they’re remade.

As a director and a writer, I have a special interest in the ways in which artists respond to moments of crisis or political or social turmoil. I've done a lot of research and I've written a couple of shows about artist relationships to dangerous works that make them targets for oppressive political regimes or that have unintended consequences beyond what the artist imagined. 

“Mr. Burns” was such a beautiful, mischievous and moving testament to a group of people's love for a story and the way in which a story may transform over time to take a different place in culture. By the end of the show, it has become a testament to the resilience of a culture that has survived a major apocalypse. 

I didn't get to the States until I was in college, so I never saw a full episode of “The Simpsons” until I was directing this show. But halfway through the design process, I started to watch it, starting with the “Cape Feare” episode mentioned in the show. 

The first time I read the play, I didn't feel alienated or confused by what was going on. However, it is really important that it is “The Simpsons,” as that show has such a wide impact and long history of being a reflection of popular concerns of the time. 

For those who don’t have the same familiarity or attachment, we have some resources from a really talented student dramaturg, and the pre-show, playing distorted pieces of Simpsons episodes, giving the audience a taste of the tone and visuals.

One of the big values was definitely transformation, especially seeing how images transform over the course of these three acts. One of the central images of the production is an electrical transmission tower that no longer works. At the beginning, you see that looming in the distance. In the second act, it is more obscured. And then in the third act, it becomes almost a temple to “The Simpsons” and electricity. 

Similarly, when it came to the projection and lighting designs, it was this interesting notion of how do you, in an indoor theatrical space, portray a world that has lost electricity? We talked about finding ways for projection to appear like magic, shadows that start to look like different things taking on life of their own.

One of the things that is fascinating about the play is how our relationship to instrumentation changes in a world without electricity, because we've learned to rely so much on electrical instrumentation and sampling and track mixing in our current culture. 

It was a similar world building exercise in the sonic world thinking, “what instruments would persist and how would we use them?” String instruments would probably remain, but what the strings are made of might change. The ensemble vocals, both in the second act and in the third act, are really cool to hear, centering the human voice and then augmenting with these other clever ways of what a post-electric musical landscape may sound like. 

UMD is one of the best theatrical design MFA programs in the country, and it’s great being able to work with students that are at a very special phase of their artistic development, where they've absorbed so many insights from their studies and are now getting to put that into practice with really excellent logistical and production support from the school. 

And then on the acting side as well, it is so great to work with undergraduate students who come in extremely prepared, with great questions and thoughts and ideas. The way in which they all support each other and they support me has been just really joyous.