Monday, June 25, 2012

The Simpsons and history: A comedy!

My favorite Simpsons episode is "Cape Feare," in which Sideshow Bob gets out of jail and chases the Simpsons, who are in Witness Protection, to Terror Lake. The courtroom scene, the H.M.S. Pinafore performance, the rakes! Genius.

Woolly Mammoth's Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play is set at some point in the near future, after an unnamed catastrophe has turned off the power, wiped cities off the map, and caused nuclear power plants to melt down. A small group of survivors spend their time recounting the plot and memorable quotes of "Cape Feare", and we see the shared history of The Simpsons bring the group together--when they're not confronting strangers with guns and patting them down.

The second and third acts bring us 7 years in the future, then 75 years after that, giving us a chance to see how civilization has progressed and how they remember what life was like "before." The longing of people to be able to relive the past was fascinating, and playwright Anne Washburn's details seemed believable (trying to figure out how many cans of Diet Coke were left, for example, made perfect sense).

The third act gives us the final telling of "Cape Feare," blending the story with how the survivors' descendants viewed the long-past disaster. The play moved from largely comical to a much more dramatic tone.

The play appealed to me as a theatre lover, a fan of The Simpsons, and a historian. ("Historian." History major?) How do we remember what happened? How important is pop culture? How does pop culture influence our lives? When we don't have the resources to remember the details of everything our lives--a post-Google world--how do we share what's important?

It was an entertaining play, and a thought-provoking one. If frustrating. I may have spent part of the first act mentally trying to tell the actors various quotes from the episode. It only made the show that much more relevant to me.

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