YSD Sings In The Key Of Springfield

Can you imagine a world without electricity? It’s almost impossible in the 21st century, when things that used to be solely physical objects — books, notebooks, photographs — have increasingly become electronic. That includes, of course, all the songs and shows we love, the things that make us who we are.

But that’s the situation of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, the first of this season’s third-year directors’ thesis shows at Yale School of Drama, running Oct. 26 through Nov. 1 at the Iseman Theater on Chapel Street.

Mr. Burns plunges us into a world after the loss of all electricity, which brings on nuclear disaster. A group of survivors — when we meet them, they’re around a campfire sharing memories of a favorite episode of The Simpsons — have to reinvent the world from scratch, based on the one that was recently wiped out. Then, seven years later, we see where they’ve gotten in developing things like entertainment and economics. Finally, after 75 years pass, we see what the next generation makes of what’s been handed down, as the remembered stories from the past become canonical and ritualized.

For Kat Yen, the show’s director, Washburn’s play asks ​“why do we do theater?” — especially in perilous times. It’s a question Yen has been thinking about a lot since New York’s Spookfish Theater Company, where she was co-artistic director for seven years, dissolved in 2017. Her answer to the question is partly informed by what she called ​“theater as therapy,” after working with Shakespeare Behind Bars for a summer and seeing the importance of storytelling as a method of rehabilitation. As Yen sees it, in the third part of Mr. Burns, ​“the world relies on theater to heal and to survive,” and telling stories becomes ​“literally necessary.”

Sometimes thesis shows are plays generated at the Yale School of Drama as works in progress, but generally they are admired works of the far past (Greek drama, Jacobean plays), or of the modern era (Ibsen or Chekhov), or from the more recent past (a Sondheim musical, for instance). Mr. Burns, from 2013, is a bit newer than the norm. Yet one of the main challenges for Yen in coming to graduate school was having to accept that she’d be ​“directing plays that have been done before.” At Spookfish, she directed four new plays a year.

But the YSD version of Mr. Burns will be one never seen before. For this production, the author permitted Yen and her team to develop new songs, which play significantly into the show’s final act. The songs derive from popular songs the cast of eight readily called to mind, thus reflecting the theme of memory and DIY techniques in the absence of recorded music. The result, said Liam Bellman-Sharpe, a third-year sound designer at Yale with a background in performance and opera, is an “amalgamation of ideas from pop, R&B, and vaguely sacred music.”

Collaboration between Bellman-Sharpe and music director Bel Ben Mamoun, a musicologist who works on historically informed performance practice, has led to instrumentation evocative of both past and future. The composers will be onstage playing devised instruments, built, Bellman-Sharpe said, “from found objects to create a blend of sounds anyone might be inclined to use.”

“Only one song is kept from Michael Friedman’s score,” Yen said, making this Mr. Burns as contemporary as the people making it. And that’s in keeping with the play’s origins. The initial version of Mr. Burns, at Wooly Mammoth in D.C., developed from improv by Washburn and the New York theater company The Civilians (including the late Friedman), which commissioned the play. The opening scene relies on the way the initial group of actors recalled the details of the episode chosen. For anyone growing up in the last decade of the previous century or the first decade of this one, The Simpsons provides a sort of lingua franca, not only of familiar characters and situations but of an influential manner of processing and repurposing pop culture.

For Yen, The Simpsons, as a show, hasn’t been that significant. Choosing Mr. Burns fit in well with the drama school’s interest in the play as one that could be developed by current students. What’s more, Yen, a Taiwanese-American very aware that mainstream theater tends to overlook Asians, deliberately chose a play whose casting could be very open in terms of ethnicity and gendered identity. The “openness” of the play, in her conception, led to a set design by Bridget Lindsay in the round. The audience, in effect, will be gathered round the campfire as well.

The intimacy of the staging plays into Yen’s ideas about what makes the play a good fit for New Haven. As she pointed out, there is a culture of “theater devotees” here, not just at Yale and in the School of Drama, but among local theatergoers who never miss Yale productions. She hopes the distinct time periods of the show — contemporary, later in the 2020s, and nearer the end of the 21st century — will “allow audiences to imagine themselves as an audience of the future, to see what they recognize and what society needs now.” And sitting in the round, looking at other audience members’ reactions, may spark “conversations that lead to actual explorations of the communal purpose of theater.”

If that sounds a bit more elevated than your sense of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie, and the folks of Springfield, well, then this show might just be an epiphanic event for you.

Mr. Burns: a post-electric play runs at the Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel St., from Oct. 26 to Nov. 1. Visit the Yale School of Drama’s website here for tickets and showtime information.