Lisa, Alissa Hall; Marg, Hannah Guzman; Homer, Patrick Maes; Bart, and Jessica Osbourne

This is the premise of Anne Washburn's ingenious and sort of brilliant play Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play. As you might guess from the title, it is based on "The Simpsons," a television show that almost every American has some familiarity with, even if don't regularly watch it.

The set-up is that some unnamed plague has decimated the population. For some reason, maybe because the people who can fix it have all died, the electrical system has stopped working. Nuclear power plants, despite producing electricity, also need electricity to run safely. If the electricity is cut off, the cooling systems fail but the rods keep heating up. There are backup generators, but when they run out of fuel, the power plants overheat and spew clouds of radiation. So the plague is only the first of our problems.

What would this "post-electric" world be like? Would it be a Hobbesian war of every man against every man? Or would a sense of community prevail? In Washburn's future, something of both, but what she's most interested in is the inextinguishable human need to create some kind of narrative, to explain our world by telling stories, to turn life into theater.

The play begins with some survivors out in the countryside around a fire, trying to recall the plot and dialogue of a particular "Simpsons" episode, the one in which Bart is almost killed by Sideshow Bob. It's a takeoff on the Cape Fear movies. (I've never seen that episode, but I don't think it makes that much difference to one's enjoyment of the play.) So this is what we will remember: not books, not the stuff we were force-fed in school, but TV and pop songs.

In act two, seven years later, we find a theatrical troupe trying to recreate "Simpsons" episodes on stage, by candlelight, complete with commercials just like on television. Since everything that was recorded when we still had electricity is no longer accessible, it has to be recaptured from people's memories, and a remembered line of dialogue becomes a valuable commodity. This is the lightest of the three acts, and is a pretty funny satire of theater people. The world may have changed completely, but egos haven't.

Act three takes place 75 years later (we only know this from the program) and is essentially an opera, a very creepy and disturbing one. The Aux Dog is billing this play as a musical comedy, but don't be misled into thinking you're going to see a Disney-fied stage version of "The Simpsons." Here, Mr. Burns finally appears, as radioactivity incarnate, and the devastation he wreaks is gruesome to behold. Indeed, life has been turned into theater.

In this act, we have gone back to the beginnings of our theatrical tradition, to the ancient Greeks, with masked characters, a narrator taking the role of the chorus, and text both sung and spoken. Will humanity survive? If it does, it will have to create new myths, a new culture based on what it can remember of its past. Bart sings the most salient line in the play: "I never died in memory."

With the three acts being so disparate, this is not an easy play to stage in a small technically challenging space like the Aux Dog, but director Victoria J. Liberatori and her cast and crew pull it off very nicely. The set and lighting by John Kupjack, props and masks by Nina Dorrance, costumes by Janelle Ciaccio, and sound design by Jessica Osbourne are all impressive.

Likewise the cast of eight. Some of them don't have very large roles, but all play their multiple roles well: Alisia Downing, Bridget Dunne, Hannah Guzman, Alissa Hall, Vincent Marcus, and Patrick Maes. The standouts are Jessica Osbourne and Fernando Gonzales, partly because they have the most prominent roles but also because they're really good. Nathaniel Flake does a good job with the music.

This is not one of those plays that evaporates when you leave the theater. The more I think about it, the more I realize how well written it is. Whether this is one of those works that will fade into oblivion, as most things do, only time will tell. I can't say that this play is for everyone, but if you're an adventurous theatergoer, I would recommend that you see it now while you have the chance.

Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play, by Anne Washburn with music by Michael Friedman, is being presented at the Aux Dog Theatre Nob Hill at 3011 Monte Vista NE in Albuquerque. Through February 1, 2015. Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00, Sundays at 2:00. Info at www.auxdog.com or 505-254-7716.

Photo: Janelle Ciaccio

--Dean Yannias