The Impact of Mr. Burns on Playwrights Horizons’ Artists

“The scope, audacity, crazy anthropological brilliance and utter wildness of Anne’s conceit in Mr. Burns knocked me out when I first saw the play and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.”
- David Adjmi (playwright, Stereophonic, New Works Lab, Almanac)

“There was my life before I saw Mr. Burns and there is my life after. It was and is one of those shows, funny and mordant and indelible and soul-shaking.”
- Daniel Aukin (director, Stereophonic, Catch as Catch Can, Placebo, New Works Lab, Artistic Advisory Council)

“Mr. Burns made me a braver playwright, and taught me that in an ensemble piece, there are an infinite number of stories to be told – that there are whole plays contained in one line of dialogue. We never get to hear what happened to each of the people who run into each other – but we imagine that play unfolding in our mind in an instant. In fact, Anne Washburn was my mentor for a writers group the year Mr. Burns premiered, and her own clarity of vision and kind encouragement inspired me as I set out to write an ensemble theater piece of my own called Men On Boats, which had a run at Playwrights of its own in 2016. Thank you, Anne!”
- Jaclyn Backhaus (playwright, Wives, Men on Boats, Playwrights Horizons Theater School faculty)

“Seeing this play was an out-of-body experience for me. It was as if Anne Washburn reached straight into this Simpsons-freak’s subconscious and wrenched free some half-formed dream I never thought possible to articulate onstage. The play is a clarion call to all playwrights to keep dreaming big.”
- Christopher Chen (playwright, under commission, Almanac)
 
“I remember reading Mr. Burns for the first time and being like, ‘wow.’”
- Milo Cramer (playwright/performer, School Pictures, New Works Lab, former Literary Fellow)

“I was the intern. I sat in on two workshops of Mr. Burns in 2013. I’ve never loved a play more. Mr. Burns taught me what theater is, liveness, and why we need it, death. And how a group of people on stage might be the best thing we’ve got to deal.”
- Sarah DeLappe (playwright, New Works Lab, former Literary Fellow)

“Mr. Burns was one of the first plays that showed me how a piece of art can be in conversation with the immediate moment and all of humanity as a whole – all while staying grounded in characters, ideas, and themes.”
- Ryan Dobrin (former Directing Fellow, New Works Lab)

“When I first moved to New York, this play came up in every rehearsal room, reading, after-party – I couldn’t escape it. It left me with eternal FOMO that I didn’t live in NY then to see it.”
- Ceci Fernandez (actor, Wet Brain, New Works Lab)

“Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a post-electric play is one of the most inspiring pieces of theater I’ve ever seen. It’s inspiring because of its exquisite specificity and staggering ambition, and because, like all great plays, it’s a formal answer to its own theatrical question: to explore the way stories evolve symbiotically with and for the cultures that create them, Anne built a play that elapses over three cultural generations, and puts us in the extraordinary – unprecedented? – position of audience-archeologists, mining the dazzling third act as we watch it for clues we recognize from acts one and two. Most of all, the play is a valentine to the theater itself, suggesting that it is not only the first art but will also be the last, the most essential, indestructible act of human expression. I love Mr. Burns because it demon- strates what many of us secretly suspect: that theater will save the world.”
- Madeleine George (playwright, The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence, New Works Lab, Artistic Advisory Council)

“I just went back and looked at some notes I jotted down after I first read Mr. Burns, in December 2010. One of which said, ‘Anne has managed to accomplish what only a genius can do, in writing a work that illuminates the tectonic movements of the world itself.’”
-  Adam Greenfield (Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons)

“Mr. Burns was the last project I worked on before lockdown. Somehow ironic, strangely prescient, and definitely impactful for this show to immediately precede the wonder and horror that was Zoom theater. And yes, Mr. Burns, we did indeed continue to tell stories, to play together, even as society crumbled.”
- Jacinth Greywoode (composer, New Works Lab)

“By the time you reach Part 3 of Mr. Burns... lots of plays didn’t need to be plays. But Anne Washburn demands theatre. While many of us relish the past or lament the present, Anne risks a future. The lesson of the imaginative leap. I couldn’t have written Tambo & Bones without Mr. Burns.”
- Dave Harris (playwright, Tambo & Bones, Soundstage, Almanac, under commission)

“Mr. Burns is one of those rare shows that made a lightbulb go off in my head: ‘Oh! I didn’t even know you could do that!’ By theatricalizing how reality becomes mythologized over time, its structure was a major influence on Jeanine Tesori’s and my 2019 musical Soft Power.”
-    David Henry Hwang (playwright, Almanac)

“Mr. Burns is about more than storytelling. Or theater. It embodies the eternal battle between good and evil. Like all lasting masterpieces, it concretizes what I need in order to even live with myself: the knowledge that turning another human being into an object is the definition of evil.”
- Craig Lucas (playwright, I Was Most Alive With You, Prayer For My Enemy, Small Tragedy, Almanac)

“This is one of the plays I think about constantly. The careful realism of the first act’s slow build. The jarring reinvention each time we jump the timeline. I’m a better writer and perhaps a slightly less pessimistic person because Mr. Burns exists.”
- Sarah Mantell (playwright, In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot [a PH commission], New Works Lab)

“When I saw the Chicago production of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, I thought – yes, I have a foremother. Thank the theatre gods for Anne’s genre-blasting, time-elasticizing, imagination-expanding work. I’ve been writing in the show’s afterglow ever since.”
- Roger Q. Mason (playwright, Almanac)

“Working on Mr. Burns reminded me that the stage can contain impossibly vast imaginative worlds.”
-    Neil Patel (set designer, Mr. Burns, Mud, River, Stone, On the Mountain, Three Changes)

“Mr. Burns was really my first big show in New York. I wish someone had told me they aren’t all like that. I also wish I could have bottled up the dizzy, brilliant feeling in the room of true experimentation – of taking giant swings and being both absolutely rigorous and absolutely stupid. Anne and Steve and dear wonderful brilliant enraging Michael set the highest bar for how I want to make theater. And the cast couldn’t have been more generous with a kid who demanded they do literally dozens of body rolls. I carry the experience with me everywhere I go.”
- Sam Pinkleton (choreographer, Mr. Burns, Stage Kiss, Fly By Night)

“I saw Mr. Burns at NYU Grad Acting in 2020. A month later, we entered quarantine due to a global pandemic. This experience served as the perfect allegory: not only does storytelling survive, but it also saves us. It’s no surprise that so many artists I admire were part of the world premiere.”
- Pauli Pontrelli (actor, The Trees, New Works Lab)

“The power of an epic triptych! The power of a sustainable energy source! Mr. Burns changed the theat- rical landscape.”
- Sarah Ruhl (playwright, Stage Kiss, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday, New Works Lab, Almanac)

“I came into the arts through devised theatre – Mr. Burns has always been *the* north star as far as what a writer and an ensemble can accomplish together. A delightfully insane, witty, heartfelt provocation. Getting to do it in grad school was a dream.”
- Dario Ladani Sanchez (actor, Selling Kabul)

“In ten years of making original work, at some point in the process, inevitably Mr. Burns blinks into the dramaturgical constellation. Maybe I’m imagining a radical jump into the future or dreaming into the sublime possibilities of some pop-culture ephemera. In any case, Washburn’s play has become a thinking tool for me. A way to imagine what else I cannot see.”
- Scott Shepphard (playwright/deviser, New Works Lab)

“Mr. Burns affirmed me as an artist. Until I was cast to join the show in the 3rd Act, I wasn’t sure if there was a space for a Black actor who sang, danced, played multiple instruments, absolutely worshipped The Simpsons (see me as an eager grad student asking multiple questions in the audience of The Simpsons episode of Inside the Actors Studio) and had a bit of quirk. This show did that all and more. Welcoming me into the fold of The Civilians and being my first experience Off-Broadway, it empow- ered me to be more fully myself. Because every yin has its yang, and every theater has its Mrs. Krabap- pel.”
- Nedra Marie Taylor (actor, Mr. Burns, A Life)

“The Simpsons? Music by Michael Friedman? Quincy Tyler Bernstine? Susannah Flood? The Civilians? Sign me up! This show knocked me out! The way it took a small piece of pop culture and cooked it into a dark, twisted and sentimental event was so engaging. Big fan. Big.”
- Jason Veasey (actor, A Strange Loop, Artistic Advisory Council)

“Stumbling out of Mr. Burns, a play with much to say about how stories are passed down, resurrected, misunderstood, and decontextualized, into the heart of midtown Manhattan, bombarded with images and advertisements, I felt (and remain) so grateful for the epiphanic perspective Anne Washburn had afforded us all that night.”
- Frank Winters (playwright, New Works Lab)

“The experience completely changed what I thought was possible to experience as an actor in one play. Three completely different worlds in as many acts. At the beginning of the show I could not conceive of being at the end of the show. I don’t expect to ever have an experience like it again. It felt so thrilling to be doing something that seemed to engage the audience in a brand new way. The experience gave me a confidence that I still draw upon.”
- Sam Breslin Wright (actor, Mr. Burns, The Trees)

“Mr. Burns is the play I’m the proudest to have been in in my entire acting career. It was like a whole MFA’s worth of acting skills in one show. Hyperrealistic ensemble acting! Stage combat! Dance! Complex singing! Mask work! I got to touch genius by living inside Anne’s world and words.”
- Colleen Werthmann (actor, Mr. Burns, Recent Tragic Events, Miss Witherspoon)