Abstract This article analyzes Anne Washburn’s wildly popular, and often controversial, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (2012) by focusing on the principal retellings that shape Mr. Burns and delineating how Washburn’s adaptations produce the thematic content of the play. Washburn deftly interweaves a variety of high and low culture source material within the plot. Pandemic and apocalyptic tropes provide the ecofictional narrative base to adaptations of Stephen King’s The Stand (1978), Euripides’s Orestes, Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991), and a variety of episodes of The Simpsons (1989–). Through these retellings, Mr. Burns metatheatrically chronicles how stories shape listeners and their cultures. When the stories told simply pander to the materialism, greed, and commodification that permeate contemporary global capitalist culture, then society proliferates those solipsistic values. Washburn ultimately argues that, in what may seem like apocalyptic times, storytelling as embodied in the theater arts must instead advocate humanitarian collectivist values.

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世界末日讲故事：安妮沃什伯恩的伯恩斯先生，一部后电剧

摘要 本文分析了安妮·沃什伯恩广受欢迎且经常引起争议的《伯恩斯先生，一部后电力剧》（2012 年），重点关注塑造伯恩斯先生的主要复述，并描绘了沃什伯恩的改编作品如何产生该剧的主题内容。沃什伯恩巧妙地将情节中的各种高低文化源材料交织在一起。大流行和世界末日的比喻为斯蒂芬·金的《立场》（1978 年）、欧里庇得斯的《俄瑞斯忒斯》、马丁·斯科塞斯的《恐惧之角》（1991 年）和《辛普森一家》（1989 年–）的各种剧集的改编提供了生态小说叙事基础。通过这些复述，伯恩斯先生元戏剧地记录了故事如何塑造听众及其文化。当故事讲述的只是迎合渗透当代全球资本主义文化的唯物主义、贪婪和商品化时，那么社会就会扩散那些唯我论的价值观。沃什伯恩最终认为，在看似世界末日的时代，体现在戏剧艺术中的讲故事必须提倡人道主义集体主义价值观。