American playwright Anne Washburn’s Mr Burns, A Post Electric Play is bursting at the seams with conceptuality. Don’t go expecting live adaptations of your favourite Simpsons characters and their familiar antics. None of them, not even the titular Mr Burns, appears in any recognizable form, except in patchy retellings of half-remembered episodes by desperate survivors of a near-future apocalypse.

Directors Simon Bloom and Mitchell Cushman (Co-Artistic Directors of Outside the March) call it “a manifesto for the inextinguishable power of live performance.” Fittingly, this rumination on how we would tell our stories in a post-electric era is performed off the grid in a defunct, powerless movie house, the Aztec Theatre on Gerrard East.

The Power of Theatre

There’s no denying that The Simpsons is more than enduringly popular; it is definitive of our times, bridging a generation gap in a way that few entertainment brands can. So it’s not unlikely that the Simpsons saga might survive in our post-apocalyptic consciousness. Without electricity, how would we keep that entertainment alive? In an app-free world, how would we share?

Instead of breaking the fourth wall, the immersive approach of Outside the March theatre company brings the audience within the walls of the world it creates. You know it’s Outside the March when they set themselves the task of staging this production “under the same post-electric conditions” as the world in which the characters exist. The show’s light and sound are powered with flashlights, batteries, calcium carbide lanterns, a hand-crank gramophone, pedal power, and Bullfrog Power’s pollution-free electricity. (Lighting designer, Nick Blais; sound designer, Samuel Sholdice.)

People Power

Damien Atkins leads a committed cast of eight which also includes Colin Doyle, Katherine Cullen, and Amy Keating. There is quite a lot of singing, although not the fluffy, singable song parodies you hear on The Simpsons, (Score, Michael Friedman; Music Director, Britta Johnson) and some snappy bits of choreography (Movement Director, Jennalee Desjardins), but a highlight that comes late in the show is the creations of puppet designer Marcus Jamin. 

While everyone onstage and behind the scenes holds nothing back, this thought experiment does not give the audience the simple task of following the development of an individual or group of characters pitted against an adversary or dilemma. We are presented with the evolution of a rebooted society and its entertainment/mythology. 

Take-home

“Eeeexcellent?” The performance is top-notch, but unlike the 22-minute episodes of snappy satire that made us all Simpsons addicts at one time or another, the three acts of Mr Burns are an elaborate imagining, two hours and 45 minutes long, spanning a period from present day to more than 80 years into the future. It’s quite a trip. 

Mr Burns, A Post Electric Play is playing at the Aztec Theatre, 1035 Gerrard Street East, until June 7. 

Runnging time: 2 hours and 45 minutes, including two 15-minute intermissions