Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play
Production Designer | January - May 2021
This design was focused on decay and the ritualisation of storytelling in 'Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play'.
The destroyed theatre in the final act of this script represents the survivors' inability to let go of their lives before and rebuild something new. Rather than accepting and embracing their new situation, they inhabit destroyed spaces from before and focus at all costs on reproducing the cartoons they remember from before. The theatre shows the decades of disuse it's faced through the crumbled back wall, scrapped stage and greenery reclaiming the space.
There's a contrast between the vibrant, cartoonish overturned school bus placed at the centre of this production and its faded surroundings, a symbol for how the before of this piece is nostalgically idolised.
The greenery creeping into the space is reminiscent of the forest setting from the beginning of the story. It represents the radioactive risks they're working so hard to ignore and their inability to embrace the nautral world, instead focusing on relics from their synthetic world of before.