PRODUCTION HISTORY

May 2012: Premiered at Wooly Mammoth Theatre in Washington D.C. by The Civilians, directed by Steven Cosson

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Aug - Oct 2013: Playwright’s Horizon in NYC, directed by Steven Cosson

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2014: Nominated for a Drama League Award for outstanding production of a Broadway or Off-Broadway play

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Spring 2014: European premier at the Almeida Theatre in London, directed by Robert Icke who commissioned Orlando Gough to compose a new acapella score for the third act. Visually and emotionally darker than the NY once, especially in the third act which resembled a Greek tragedy as much as The Simpsons.

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DEVELOPMENT

Anne was exploring what it would be like to “take a TV show and push it past the apocalypse and see what happened to it." She originally considered Friends, Cheers, and MASH.

 

A workshop was held for a week in a bank vault beneath Wall Street, which was being used as a shared rehearsal space in 2008 to see how much of any episode of The Simpsons the actors assembled could remember. One of the actors Matthew Maher knew The Simpsons well, and group decided on the 1993 episode of “Cape Feare," which is based on a 1991 film Cape Fear, which is a remake of a 1962 film of the same name, which is based on a 1957 novel, The Executioners. Maher helped the other actors remember the episode, then the two of them went on to perform it for an audience without his help. Anne Washburn utilized recordings of this process in writing the first act.