Hi everyone! Your friendly neighborhood dramaturg Elijah here with another blog post for Mr. Burns. As we head into our second weekend of performances, we’re going to go a little more in depth into of the context of the third act of the show. 

​

Act three of Mr. Burns takes place 75 years after act two, where we last saw the characters try to re-create the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons as kind of a travelling theatre troupe. The biggest distinction between act three and the previous acts is that act three is written as a musical. The plot of the act is part re-creation of “Cape Feare,” part re-telling of the apocalypse, and part archetypal “good guy beats bad guy” story. To understand this act, our production team looked closely at comparative mythology, a practice popularized by mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) in which myths from different cultures are compared to see what similarities or differences arise. By viewing act three through a mythological lens, we understood the music to be part of a liturgical practice—kind of like a Simpsons church. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Historically, mythology has served many purposes. In cultures that didn’t have the scientific knowledge to explain natural phenomena, stories were often made up to explain phenomena instead. One of the most common myths across cultures is a “creation myth”— a story that explains how the world was created. The first number in act three, “The Call Came on the Radio,” serves the function of a creation myth by explaining how the world after electricity came to be. As a common memory of The Simpsons has permeated the post-electric world, the characters in act three use The Simpsons as a way to contextualize the apocalypse so that everybody can share a similar understanding. 

​

Whether a creation myth depicts the beginning of the world accurately or not doesn’t matter, as another, arguably more important, function of myth is to create a sense of structure and community. In order for a large society to function properly, members of that society must have a certain level of common understanding of their world. If nobody can adequately interpret their reality, chaos is soon to follow. In our contemporary moment, we use multiple tools to help contextualize our reality. If a terrible storm occurs, we use scientific knowledge to understand why the storm happened and how to prevent damage in the future. If a political movement turns violent and ends many lives, we use sociology and history to understand why the movement began and how to make sure violence doesn’t occur in the future. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

In Mr. Burns, science, sociology, and history are not so accessible due to the lack of electricity. In both acts one and two, we see the characters constantly questioning how their world got to be this way: When did the nuclear plants go down? When did the big fires start? How long does a nuclear plant stay radioactive for? What happened to all the Diet Cokes, anyway? Because nobody has a comprehensive understanding of the world they’re living in, they’re subsequently unable to create a large, stable society. 

​

Finally, in act three, we see the inhabitants of this new, post-electric world make sense of their circumstances through music, mythology, and liturgy. Did the actual end of the world start with Troy McClure stuttering over the radio? Probably not, but that reality no longer matters. Without electricity, the characters in act three don’t have the scientific knowledge of how their world began, so to build a stable society, they create a story about the beginning of the world instead. 

​