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‘Mr. Burns’ tells apocalyptic story

Cast members from 'Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play' perform a scene from the three-act play. Photo by Maddie Gehling.
Cast members from ‘Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play’ perform a scene from the three-act play. Photo by Maddie Gehling.

Scott Kanoff never imagined he’d work on a play about “The Simpsons,” Brittney Spears, an opera and the apocalypse.

But the theatre arts department chair is currently directing “Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play,” a show that centers around all of these things.

“It’s taking everything we’ve got,” Kanoff said. “It begins with the birth of a story. There are seven disaster survivors in the woods, around a fire trying to remember a particular episode of ‘The Simpsons’ … The first act is set in the very near future outdoors. The second act is set seven years later and the third act is set 75 years beyond that.”

The characters of “Mr. Burns” live through an apocalypse, and each reminisces about better times by remembering the same episode of “The Simpsons.” Years later, they travel across the country performing the episode live. Later still, their descendants act out the apocalypse and how the original characters came together through a dramatic opera.

“[It’s about] the story of the disaster, how humans define themselves as storytellers, how we have a primal need to account for our existence, to tell our story, to advance our story, to alter our story in relation to our changing needs and to pass our story on to other generations,” Kanoff said.

Stage manager Emily Goldman said putting the show together has not been without challenges.

“[Producing] the show has been a struggle,” Goldman, a senior theatre production major, said. “We’ve been adding new elements every day that usually we have before we even start rehearsing.”

Goldman said representing the post-apocalyptic setting of “Mr. Burns” in a nuanced way involved a great deal of planning and revising.

“We designed it in the beginning to be minimal lighting because [they didn’t have lights after the apocalypse], and we realized in tech that it needs to have more lighting, so we’ve had to redesign everything,” Goldman said.

However, Goldman said she looks at this process as a learning experience for students.

“It’s an educational theatre, so some of this will happen in the real world,” she said. “I’m thankful we’re doing this now so we can see what it might be like when we get outside.”

While Goldman has been working on “Mr. Burns” since April, sophomore Trevor Baty has had less time to adjust the “post-electric” world.

Baty, a theatre performance major, was contacted over the summer about taking up the role of “Sam” after the original cast member transferred from Bradley. While every other cast member returned to the Hilltop two weeks before school began to rehearse “Mr. Burns,” Baty, who was originally cast as an ensemble character, was only able to return five days early.

“My family left me [at Bradley at the end of summer], gave me $150 for groceries and were like, ‘We’ll see you when we see you,’” Baty said. “Pretty much from that moment on … I watched three or four ‘Simpsons’ episodes a day … I read the script and had to catch up with the rest of the cast. It was an intensive five days of me trying to fit in as much as I could.”

But Baty said he’s glad he took the opportunity to be in “Mr. Burns.”

“I will never do anything like this again in my life,” he said. “You will never see a piece of theatre like this … This is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.”

Mr. Burns runs until Oct. 2, with performances on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and a matinee on Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $5 with a Bradley ID.

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