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.

Why Do I Still Watch The Simpsons? Well, I'll Tell You

It's been a horrifying week, eh? Well, I'm all for taking refuge in escapism, and for me, there's no place more comfortable than Springfield.

One of the most pressing questions of The Simpsons‘ 24 year run—besides “Why has Homer not been arrested for child abuse?”—is, “Why hasn’t Marge ever asked for divorce?” It’s possible her husband is the dumbest man in the universe. He’s certainly the least sensitive. Just off the top of my head, he once gave her a bowling ball for her birthday. When she got interested in folk art, he smashed his car into her popsicle stick sculptures. She cannot have a party without him getting blind drunk. In fact, she can’t get up in the morning without him getting blind drunk. And yet, she never clears out.

When a show runs for 515 episodes (and counting!) it’s impossible for there to be any reasonable continuity. As such, there are lots of different versions of Homer and Marge’s relationship, and different reasons for why she sticks around. In the weakest episodes, she is won over by a grand, last-minute gesture—something sweet that might make up for the horrible thing that Homer did today, but does nothing to explain away the 514 things he’s done before. In the best, the writers manage to show that for all Homer’s catastrophic imbecility, these two have a bond of genuine love.

If you'd like to know why I love Homer too, well, click here, ya numbskull.