Brilliant Play Falls Apart, 75 Years After The Apocalypse

I've been waiting to see Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns: a post electric play  for over a year, ever since it premiered at D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. A few weeks ago, I that dream was fulfilled, in the cozy confines of Playwrights Horizons. The first two acts of the play were brilliant, doing everything I expected and a hell of a lot more, but then...well, I already wrote the review. Why not just read that?

Civilization has collapsed in a nuclear haze, and a gang of survivors huddle around the campfire, trying to keep out the dark by retelling an old Simpsons episode. They cobble it together bit by bit, without the DVD safety net to help them fill in gaps, knowing that whatever they can't remember will be lost to history. The world has gone dark, and no one will ever watch The Simpsonsagain.

This is a melancholy thought, especially for someone who has been watching The Simpsons his entire life. That caustic yellow family first appeared on The Tracey Ullman Show a few months before I was born, and took to primetime when I was two. As a child, my evenings revolved around the 5 p.m. syndicated episode, and the show still has the power to take me back to childhood. It's a security blanket, and if the world ended, it's where I would turn as well.

The Simpsons is an incredibly rich text, stuffed with intricate throwaway gags that make each episode endlessly watchable, and—as Washburn's characters quickly figure out—surprisingly hard to remember in full. Everyone knows The Simpsons,  and that shared understanding is strong enough to support anything Washburn wants to make of it. By the end of the second act of Mr. Burns, she has stripped America's longest-running scripted show down to its essentials, allowing her to build something entirely new out of familiar parts. That the play eventually collapses is not because she asks too much of her source material, but because she doesn't take it far enough.

Now, because it was (quite rightly) cut from the review, let's revel in this for a few seconds. 

Thank god for the Simpsons, and for Anne Washburn. The play, as a whole, doesn't work for me, but it does so in a way that makes it much more fun to talk about. So let's talk! Tweet at me or whatnot and we can discuss a discussion.

Fifty Pounds of Foam Makes For One Sweaty Actor

What kind of challenges did you face in designing this colossal suit? 

It's the biggest thing that I've had to fabricate for the stage. The fabrication of it began in July, but we've been on this project since March. As you know, without the fat suit the play isn't quite convincing. It was a long process of trial and error, because no one had really made something so big. Something like Fat Bastard, or those celebrities that go around and are fat for a day, that's always a joke. We wanted something that would be convincing, and not evoke a comedic response but empathy and humanity.

The question was, how do we make it real on an Off Broadway budget? We had to have it ready for the actor to rehearse in it almost from day one. Because everyone else's job depended on the suit being finished, it was important that we do our job way in advance.

So how did you make it work? 

It was about what worked on Shuler's body. We knew going in that we couldn't begin until we had the actor. From my research, every person who gained weight, every person who is six hundred pounds, they all carry it in different places. It was all about Shuler's anatomy. He asked us to make it heavier, so he could feel enough of the pull of gravity so it could be semi-realistic. So we had to experiment with how much foam to put on it, what kind of foam,  thicker foams and thinner foams and how to make each part move independently.

It became sculptural, in a way. We had a fitting with Shuler for four hours, putting pieces of flab in various spots on Shuler's body and seeing where it felt right.

How much does the thing weigh?

It weighs about fifty pounds. It does look like more. It probably couldn't and shouldn't weigh any more because Shuler has to sit in it for so long. It's quite hot. 

He sweats a lot during the play. How much of that comes from the weight of the suit, and how much is make up?

Some of it is him, and some of it we've added. The idea is that the play is five days in this man's life, and we made the choice to have him not change clothes. We figure, Charlie probably doesn't have access to very many outfits, and right now he probably doesn't care much about changing clothes. We have five different shirts that we rotate through the play that get increasingly sweaty and stained. They deteriorate as he deteriorates.

Was he excited to get into the suit?

He's been such a champion, so game for it. He was really collaborative with the process from the beginning. He would wear it all through tech, fifteen hours a day, and you can't pee in it. It takes two people to take it off him. It's kind of masochistic, but it's been helpful to him, to help him get some understanding of how it is to be Charlie. He did a lot of research as well, watching people of this size move and breathe. His performance is partly the suit, but it's also him selling it.

So you're pleased with how it turned out?

It was a labor of love. Everyone came into this excited and challenged by the prospect of having such a big piece on stage. Everyone involved was committed to maintaining the integrity of the character. That was the challenge—not poking fun, not making it too big, so that we could create a reality for this world. We did an incredible job—better than expected for such a small space. The audience is literally a couple of feet away, which means we had to really do our diligence and make every piece authentic. We're all very proud.