Most go to the theater to lose themselves in a story, but what happens when that story stories the recollection of another story? A few self-indulgent hours are lost to passé meta machinations? Anne Washburn’s scintillating Mr. Burn’s: a post-electric play-as postmodern and meta as it is- takes the conceit in an alternative, more sincere direction. Director Mark Rucker’s comic tour de force production is a study in the value of art, the futility of language, and the tension between mythological and scientific knowledge gathering. And for contemporary post-anything art, it’s refreshingly unaffected

Set in the post-apocalyptic Midwest, about 80 years into the future (though no one knows exactly since the electrical grid blew out after the failure of America’s main nuclear power plant), this play centers around six characters’ recollections of the famous Simpsons episode, “Cape Feare,” in which Bart is hunted down by a villainous Sideshow Bob. Ironically or not, the episode “Cape Feare” was based off of Martin Scorcese’s eponymous film, itself a remake of Robert Mitchum’s 1962 film.

What starts out as a struggle to salvage and reassemble a single piece of the American pop culture narrative evolves (Or does it devolve? This is one of Washburn’s central questions.) into a bizarre, atavistic pastiche of lines from the Simpsons,  Beyonce, Lady Gaga, and numerous other mistaken epigrams and malapropisms. Over the course of 80 years, characters warp pre-apocalyptic pop culture into something so proverbial in spirit, yet sui generis in form, you’ll feel as if you were in someone else’s dream. But it’s impossible to forget Mr. Burns: a post-electric play.