Mr. Burns at Home Grown Theater

Or: The Wrath of Simpsons

At the appointed hour you, the audience, are ushered down a set of impersonal white washed sets down into the basement of the Gem Theater for the arts, to as black and boxy a space as anyone could want. Lights glow in paint can sconces, a tiny bar dispenses tickets and beer. Not a bad place to construct a cozy fall out shelter or to tackle a three-act epic about human nature the stories we tell.

Perhaps the finest and subtlest post-post-apocalyptic story, Anne Washburn’s play follows a group of survivors through the years after a hazy but definitely radioactive calamity. We first meet them by firelight, strangers melded together by shared trauma, some piecing together an old Simpson’s episode, while others patrol their campsite with an assault rifle. One intermission and seven years later these same hands are bound together as an itinerate theater company helping the rooting communities of the once untied states remember happier times. By act three, the tales they put together in the firelight have become something none of them could have imagined.

Any company hoping to handily carry of Mr. Burns must deal not only with playwright Anne Washburn’s herculean vision but also with her hyperrealist, show-don’t-tell, intricacies. Home Grown’s production has done a well at finding and seasoning the textual breadcrumbs for us. What is lacking, or rather what remains as yet untapped, is the dialog in-between the lines, the horror that drives the characters to find meaning in a cartoon rather than think about all the ghosts behind them and all the horrors before. An exception to this is Veronica Von Tobel’s Colleen, first glimpsed as a voiceless mourner in act one revealed to be a fiery director in act two, full of witticisms, trying to turn out a profitable show on no budget and less time. She’s direct, punchy, commanding, but whenever danger threatens to rip through the tiny manageable world she and her compatriots have cooled together there is a tightening, a madness born of terror and loss (that and a lovely singing voice sparkle through act three).

This Mr. Burns thrives on comedy, from the ever rich joys of making much with tiny satisfying moments like Good Ol’ Boy Sam (Chris Mayne) bounding across the stage late for his entrance, or the company’s diva Quincy (Jamie Nebecker) swanning about, a spirit so indomitable that apparently not even the apocalypse could tamp her down. Even the odd technical errors (and in a show of this scope some must be allowed for, even welcomed) are scooped up in stride and used to garnish a joke. It’s a jolly good time and if the third act plods when it should slink but that is ultimately Washburn’s fault for overflowing eloquence into grandstanding.

Towards of the end of the second act, Quincy gets into a heated debate with the hapless Susannah (Liberty Leeds Klautsch) about the nature of their work. Quincy argues that serving up Comedy, a laugh in a world out to kill you, is reason enough while Susannah believes that the stories they tell could be used to build something greater. The conversation is the nail upon which the entire production is hung, and a sign of the wonders to come in Act Three, but it also comes closest to spelling out why Mr. Burns is not only a fun play but a great one, and why it ought to linger in the mind long after its half-life on the stage. Though Home Grown, down in the dark stumbles at first to hold the weight of this particular world on its shoulders, they have wit and heart enough to show us the treasure, and I have no doubt that in time it will find its feet.