Director Steward Savage

“It’s important that I don’t tell you end of this story. It would ruin it. Suffice it to say that Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play — a great story in and of itself — examines the very nature of storytelling. Though I can tell you that the story begins, as the first human storytelling likely began, around the light of the campfire. And the story ends, rather more complexly, but still in relation to light. 

Exactly why human beings represent their experiences and their fantasies in stories may be too complex to be completely understood. What we do know is that the need for story is universal — it is a pillar of the human experience, ubiquitous across time and culture. In his book, Three Uses of the Knife, David Mamet suggests that storytelling is fundamentally an exercising of our adaptive capacity — the very thing that has enabled us to survive. Certainly, for the characters in Mr. Burns, storytelling is tantamount to survival.

All cultures need to tell stories, and our stories themselves are connected — iterative variations of one another. Bugs Bunny was born from Br’er Rabbit, who in turn was born from African folklore. Many of Shakespeare’s basic story lines existed before he wrote his plays. The stories of the gods and heroes of 12th Century BC Greece were transmitted orally for four hundred years, written down in the 8th century BC (very appropriately for the purposes our play by Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey), only eventually to be adapted into dramatic works in the 4th century BC by Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. The citizens going to see the plays at the Festival of Dionysus all knew these stories already. What they were going to see was Euripides’ latest spin. And that spin was, obliquely or directly, a response to present-day times.

Similarly, Mr. Burns is in some ways an age-old story, a variation on a theme. It is at once universal and a product of its times. It is highly referential, and its main reference – The Simpsons – is perhaps one of the most referential story forms ever, each episode packed with scores of references to popular culture, literature, and history. This kind of layered referentiality, sometimes ironic, sometimes sincere, creates its own unique aesthetic that our cave painting ancestors would be baffled by. What they would recognize in Mr. Burns, however, is this: sometimes the closest we human beings can get to expressing our awe — at the beauty and brutality of the world, at the inextricability of life and death — is by telling a story around the campfire.” ——Steward Savage, Director

Director BROOKE FERRELL

“It’s important that I don’t tell you end of this story. It would ruin it. Suffice it to say that Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play — a great story in and of itself — examines the very nature of storytelling. Though I can tell you that the story begins, as the first human storytelling likely began, around the light of the campfire. And the story ends, rather more complexly, but still in relation to light. 

Exactly why human beings represent their experiences and their fantasies in stories may be too complex to be completely understood. What we do know is that the need for story is universal — it is a pillar of the human experience, ubiquitous across time and culture. In his book, Three Uses of the Knife, David Mamet suggests that storytelling is fundamentally an exercising of our adaptive capacity — the very thing that has enabled us to survive. Certainly, for the characters in Mr. Burns, storytelling is tantamount to survival.

All cultures need to tell stories, and our stories themselves are connected — iterative variations of one another. Bugs Bunny was born from Br’er Rabbit, who in turn was born from African folklore. Many of Shakespeare’s basic story lines existed before he wrote his plays. The stories of the gods and heroes of 12th Century BC Greece were transmitted orally for four hundred years, written down in the 8th century BC (very appropriately for the purposes our play by Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey), only eventually to be adapted into dramatic works in the 4th century BC by Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. The citizens going to see the plays at the Festival of Dionysus all knew these stories already. What they were going to see was Euripides’ latest spin. And that spin was, obliquely or directly, a response to present-day times.

Similarly, Mr. Burns is in some ways an age-old story, a variation on a theme. It is at once universal and a product of its times. It is highly referential, and its main reference – The Simpsons – is perhaps one of the most referential story forms ever, each episode packed with scores of references to popular culture, literature, and history. This kind of layered referentiality, sometimes ironic, sometimes sincere, creates its own unique aesthetic that our cave painting ancestors would be baffled by. What they would recognize in Mr. Burns, however, is this: sometimes the closest we human beings can get to expressing our awe — at the beauty and brutality of the world, at the inextricability of life and death — is by telling a story around the campfire.” ——Steward Savage, Director