Anne Washburn – Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play

• Theme: Theatre after apocalypse; mythologizing pop culture.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play unfolds like a triptych of epistemic collapse and reformation, mirroring the Foucauldian insight that power and knowledge are inseparable, and that what we remember—and how we narrate it—becomes the very condition of our ethical selves. Washburn’s dystopian theatre does not merely tell a post-apocalyptic story—it rebuilds the scaffolding of subjectivity through fragments of shared memory, pop culture, trauma, and ritual.

In Foucault’s terms, the play stages a genealogy not of civilization per se, but of subject-formation under cultural extinction. It begins in the aftermath of global catastrophe—where electricity, digital media, and systems of governance have collapsed. Survivors cling to one of the last remaining cultural artifacts: an episode of The Simpsons ("Cape Feare"). At first, this recalls Foucault’s analysis of archives and regimes of truth—that even what we remember as entertainment becomes a field of power, identity, and ethics when other structures vanish.

As the play progresses through its three acts—shifting from campfire oral tradition, to a dystopian theatre company, to a fully ritualized mythic drama—the line between truth and fiction, ritual and performance, memory and myth disintegrates. What was once trivial satire becomes sacred narration, a transformation Foucault might understand as the rescripting of power through discursive reinvention.

Act I presents a community in the care of the self—gathering, sharing, speaking. Their acts of collective memory echo Foucault’s emphasis on ethopoiesis—the shaping of the self through ethical practice. Remembering television becomes an act of resistance, survival, even intimacy.

Act II introduces the economy of simulation—a troupe monetizing memory through re-enactments, copyright battles, and pseudo-authenticity. This mid-act satire of late capitalism gone feral reflects Foucault’s suspicion of modernity’s commodification of truth and art. The players are not only performing—they are policing and competing over memory, a form of discursive struggle for dominance.

Act III, however, is something radically other. Here, the cartoon becomes religion; Mr. Burns transforms into a cosmic demon, the Simpsons into a mythological pantheon, and Bart—a trickster, a survivor, a redeemer. It is a limit-experience—where art ceases to imitate life and becomes a metaphysical mirror. This ritualized form is Foucault’s technē tou biou (the art of life) transfigured: the performance is not mere reenactment—it is an ontological necessity.

Ultimately, Mr. Burns shows us how humans constitute themselves through art when institutions fail. In the dark, we remember; in remembering, we recreate; and in recreating, we transform the self into something mythic. Foucault’s question—“What kind of subject are we becoming?”—is answered here: we become narrative, we become performance, we become ritual.