'Mr. Burns' turns post-apocalyptic nights luminous

Post-apocalyptic scenarios are big on conjuring the obvious while telling us how bad things will be.  But amid all that death, doom and destruction, might our remembrance of things past help us build a better future?  Might the stories we tell not only keep the dark at bay but promise a new dawn?

The dark and cold were already coming fast as I huddled around a bonfire Monday night, in a field beyond a warehouse at the desolate northern edge of Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood.

Hunkering down with me were five members of director Leda Hoffmann’s Luminous Theatre cast, enacting Act I of "Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play," which I called “brilliant” when reviewing its Wisconsin premiere last spring at Forward Theater in Madison. Hoffmann’s excellent Luminous Theatre production makes it easy to stand by that assessment.

Forward’s production, which I loved, was staged in a theater.  The stakes seem higher when the campfire Washburn prescribes for Act I is real, tended by Kelly Doherty’s Maria as she and fellow survivors of a recent nuclear meltdown try to recall the legendary Cape Feare episode of “The Simpsons.”

The survivors gathered with Maria – played by James Carrington, Nick Narcisi, Ericka Wade and Rachael Zientek – can be very funny as they try to piece together and regularly misremember lines from the original.

But their spirited and comic reconstruction has a serious point – true to a “Simpsons” episode that parodies a 1991 movie, itself echoing a 1962 film adapted from a 1957 novel.

Every story we salvage from the past has its own history, continually being remade to help us make sense of who we are now.  Which, in the post-electric future in which Washburn’s play opens, includes a parody of a dark movie that allows us to voice our fear and then laugh at it.

Joined by two more survivors (played by Dylan Bolin and Hannah Ripp-Dieter), we move into an unheated, dimly lighted warehouse for Act II.

Seven years into a post-electric future, these survivors have become a traveling troupe of players, rehearsing bits from “The Simpsons,” a medley of pop songs and vignettes showcasing long-gone luxuries from Coke and Chablis to a steamy bath and TV.  It’s both nostalgic and hopeful: lamenting a vanished past while celebrating our desire for more, because survival is insufficient.

This production burns most brightly in the ingenious Act III, set 82 years after the apocalypse.

With a score by Michael Friedman (and musical direction here by James Kaplan), it’s a cross between an operetta and a passion play, featuring a chorus (bolstered by Alex Campea and Eva Nimmer) and pitting Bart (Zientek) against the satanic Mr. Burns (Jordan Gwiazdowski), in a battle for the soul of the world.

And yes: The stakes really do seem that high, in a piece movingly reminding us that even in the worst of times, our best selves can rise up and take back the night.

“Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play” continues through May 8 at The Goat Palace, 3740 N. Fratney St.  All performances are pay-what-you can.  For more information, visit www.luminoustheatre.com/.  Read more about this production at tapmilwaukee.com.

PROGRAM NOTES

“Simpsons” Geek: Carrington, a self-professed Simpsons geek in real life, channels that devotion in his portrait of Matt, the excitable and likable Simpsons fan who leads the charge to reconstruct the “Cape Feare” episode (Carrington will later play Scratchy the cat, also from “The Simpsons,” but I digress).  When Dylan Bolin’s Gibson confesses that he’s never watched an entire “Simpsons” episode, Carrington’s horrified reaction cracked me up. 

But Gibson’s confession raises a larger question: Need one be a Matt-like “Simpsons” fanboy to enjoy Washburn’s play?  While as a “Simpsons” fan I’m not ideally positioned to answer, I’ll do so anyway: “no, you don’t.”  Sure: if you care to invest the 20-plus minutes watching the “Cape Feare” episode before attending a performance, you’ll more readily spot the ways in which the reconstruction of that episode in “Mr. Burns” gets it wrong.  But Washburn’s play isn’t ultimately about the Simpsons.  It’s about why we tell stories.

Why We Tell Stories: I’ve already said plenty about this topic above, but I’d like to emphasize how good this cast is in conveying the urgency with which we tell stories, and why we need them. 

There are a lot of bad and scary things that happen in this play; an anarchic, post-apocalyptic world can give free rein to our worst instincts.  Which is why those fighting back against such darkness crave stories that acknowledge our fear while feeding our hunger for a seeming oasis – such as the houseboat featuring prominently in both versions of “Cape Fear” and the “Cape Feare” parody – offering refuge from life’s storms and shared with those one loves.  The theater becomes such a refuge for the survivors, here.  The theater can be such a refuge, for us. 

Hoffmann’s cast registers the daily terror that’s part and parcel of survival in this world; these characters can be jumpy and snappish and they’re not above having a meltdown.  Every interruption from “out there” to their reconstructive efforts triggers a pause, some of which go long and border on the despondent.  But these characters regularly find a way to begin again, continuing the story.

How We Tell Stories, Part I: Do you remember when it was possible to rehash a movie, a moment from history or a book during which you’d painstakingly collaborate with those around you, sharing the individual pieces you each remembered and then weaving them together?  The result might have been flawed; details in the story that emerged were often wrong or out of order.  But the sharing – the giving and taking – of the reconstruction were itself important in accomplishing the longed-for connection with others that drives our need to remember a shared past in the first place.

Smart phones have eliminated this process; instead of remembering the past together, we just look it up.  Use of the imagination in such moments has given way to trumping factoids.

Conversely, a post-electric world like the one presented here requires characters to pay closer attention to each other.  To lean on and help each other. To create together. To learn trust. And love. Hoffmann and her Act I cast give us all of that.  And when they walked together toward the warehouse at the end of Act I, I felt correspondingly closer to the audience members left behind with me.  We were gathered before this bonfire, after all, because we hungered for stories as much as those characters who had just created one for us.

How We Tell Stories, Part II: Not since the demise of Michael Cotey’s much-missed Youngblood Theatre Company has a theater director in Milwaukee been as thoughtful about site-specific staging as Hoffmann, who previously brought us Margaret Atwood’s “The Penelopiad” – set in Hades – under the Holton St. viaduct. Staging “Mr. Burns” in a desolate pocket of Riverwest, much of it unfolding in a warehouse with no indoor plumbing (portable toilets are provided) and no heat, allows us to better appreciate what these characters would have experienced. 

I’d wager this venue also excited Hoffmann’s designers, forced to work without cutting-edge technology within a world that places a premium on the imagination.  Form thereby mirrors content; when a lighting mastermind like Jason Fassl or a musician like James Kaplan are forced to work in such primitive conditions, they necessarily channel what it would be like for the characters we watch in Acts II and III, who are making theater under even more challenging conditions. 

And yes, for the record: Fassl and Kaplan rise to the occasion, splendidly.  I was particularly taken with Fassl’s recreation of what Washburn prescribes for Act II, which we’re told “takes place in an interior under a skylight in the afternoon.”  Things are only slightly more fancy in Act III, during which a stocking-capped Kaplan plays an upright off to the side, fighting the cold while his singers deliver a warm, evocative and poignant story of how and why we go on, even when we’ve seemingly lost everything that made living matter (the singing is good and, refreshingly, is done without mics; this is a post-electric world, after all). 

Andrea Bouck’s and Leslie Vaglica’s costumes weave homespun magic, recycling castoff detritus from the fallen world to recreate this new one (you’ll love Marge’s towering blue beehive).  Alchemist Theatre’s Aaron Kopec gives us a car he made.  Theatre RED’s Christopher Elst contributes some deliciously funny swordplay for Gwiazdowski’s Burns (a marvelously melodramatic villain) and Zientek’s seemingly overmatched Bart.     

Pre-Electric and Post-Electric: Such a focus on stagecraft in this post-electric world calls to mind the pre-electric world of Shakespeare, particularly as seen in original practices productions of the sort favored by Mark Rylance or as recreated in a play like “Shakespeare in Love,” which I’d seen in Chicago just the day before watching “Mr. Burns.”

Formally different as these two plays are, both are love songs to theater and its artists, frequently working under nearly impossible conditions and at great personal sacrifice, for little or no money and an assurance that their work will be misunderstood by critics and quickly forgotten by everyone else. 

Why do they do it? 

Because survival truly is insufficient.  The characters in “Mr. Burns” get this, in a world that’s nearly dead.  The actors performing “Mr. Burns” get this, in a world that wants to reduce everything to dollars and cents.  Was I moved by what they’ve wrought, producing a challenging play like this under difficult circumstances, with obvious commitment and integrity?  You bet I was.  Despite Washburn’s title, this production of her play is electrifying.