Setting

Act One - the very near future

(brief intermission)

Act Two - 7 years after that

(brief intermission)

Act Three - 75 years after that

Producer's Note

Hello, and welcome to Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, the second production of MCLA Theatre's 2021-2022 season.  This show is produced under the auspices of TheatreLab, MCLA Theatre's umbrella for formal, infrastructural experimentation.  With TheatreLab, we give ourselves license to push and pull both at what theatre is, and how we make it.  We have in the past used this mechanism to explore site-specific work and script deconstruction techniques.  For this production, we have explored student leadership and intra-organizational partnerships.

First, the show was directed, choreographed, and designed by students, positions that are typically held in our season by faculty members.  While a faculty member advised this team and served as producer, all creative decisions were made and executed by the students.  Our goal has been to explore self-reliance and problem-solving, skills that our student  artists will need in spades as they make the transition to working professionals.

Also for this experiment, we partnered with Harlequin, MCLA's musical theatre performance club.  MCLA Theatre took on the responsibility of producing Acts One and Two, while Harlequin produced Act Three.  This blending of curricular and extra-curricular efforts has been an opportunity to explore intra-organizational partnerships, and necessitated thoughtful and intentional coordination between the two entities' cultures and norms.

Director's Note

Upon first reading this play, I admit I didn’t think much of it. This was during our season selection process last spring, and the committee’s enthusiasm for Mr. Burns was a surprise. To me, the show initially read as the playwright’s strange Simpsons obsession and nothing more.

Oh how terribly wrong I was. 

Underneath the blue hair, renditions of the Cape Fear theme, and endless exclamations of “Doh!” is something very raw and human. The show is not about the Simpsons. The show is about people, and crisis, and what we choose to cling to during a period of mass, collective grief. How do we survive trauma? How do we maintain our sanity, our relationships? I think back to the countless TV shows and movies I escaped into during the early stages of quarantine. What did you choose to anchor to? What has become our strange and comforting mythology? Why do we find comfort in escapism?

Mr. Burns provides a platform of exploration into grief through humor. It explores an ensemble dynamic that mimics how we form relationships, how families are formed out of bonds, not blood. 

I am so incredibly proud of each and every person who worked on Mr. Burns. I am so privileged and grateful to collaborate with such a brave, honest, and determined group of theatre makers. This group is surely one in a million.

And thank you, audience member, for joining us here, engaging with live, communal storytelling once again. To be able to share the work of these fine people is a gift, offered with even more gratitude than before by the awareness the grief we share.

“And now I will do everything.” -Bart 

MCLA Theatre is a liberal arts theatre program.  Please visit mcla.edu/theatre for more information.