On "Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play:" An Interview with Guest Director Scout Davis

UB Theatre and Dance thrives in great part due to the contributions of professional guest artists and scholars. In 2024 we welcome two new guest directors, Scout Davis and Eric Deeb Weaver, to guide the creation of our spring productions of Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play and 9 to 5 The Musical, respectively.

This is the first of two interviews. In getting to know Scout, we had an opportunity to discuss their perspective on Mr. Burns, and what audiences can expect this spring. The show runs March 7 - 10, 2024 in the UB Center for the Arts Black Box Theatre.

Scout Davis (they/them) is a non-binary queer creator of live communal performance works. Their work has been seen at The LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, HERE Arts Center, The Clemente Center, The Brick, The Wild Project and Dixon Place. Recent directing credits include Putting it Together and Small Mouth Sounds at Pace School of the Performing Arts and Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at Seton Hill University, and As I Eat The World by Luis Roberto Herrera at The Tank. They are currently developing new work with playwrights Eliza Bent, Krista Knight and Calley Anderson to name a few. Scout is an alumni of The John Wells MFA Directing Program at Carnegie Mellon University.  

What attracted you to direct Mr. Burns? And what aspects of your previous work do you feel will inform your direction of the play?

I was raised on The Simpsons. The show itself has been a bedrock for me artistically, it has informed how I approach directing performance and more specifically nuanced comedic storytelling. I used to have DVD boxes of every season before streaming services were around and the TV show itself allowed me a space of pure escapism. The show means a great deal to me.

Mr. Burns was very much on my dream list of shows I would love to direct one day. This epic challenges me and the group of artists surrounding the work to push ourselves towards a greater ferocity and athleticism in performance. I was attracted to this show initially through Michael Friedman's beautiful score. I got to meet Michael before he died in 2017 and his work and energy changed my life forever. I have been indebted to him as well as Anne Washburn-who has been an active resource during my time with this work, helping me gain an understanding of how Mr. Burns may need to live and breathe today versus some years ago when it first premiered. 

A lot of my previous work has led me to this point, from devised making processes that I have facilitated to musicals I have directed to interview-based verbatim performances I have generated-it all has brought me to this work which engages all of these aspects intimately. The multifaceted nature in forms of storytelling in this show allows for an unpredictability in live performance that gives us the space to ask the important question, why are we all alive today?

Mr. Burns seems to nearly elevate The Simpsons to the status of Shakespeare in a post-apocalyptic world. If you agree, how much do you feel that this is a commentary on the way pop culture is our common modern currency, and is it fair to think of The Simpsons as in any way equivalent to Shakespeare in his day?

A: I do agree that Mr. Burns elevates the status of this cultural core piece of iconography in our society. Because of the circumstances of this post-apocalyptic world, the characters in this play clutch onto what they can remember, continue to re-imagine the moments they can hold onto and try to envision how this story may impact generations to come. Like Shakespeare, Mr. Burns utilizes what is popular to a culture as a way to re-conceive the ways in which we wish to see the world and perhaps even interrogate these worlds and how we arrived at this moment in time. We see this in both works expansively with life and death stakes which push the characters in these shows to new heights. This elevation asks us at the end of the play what is the cost of this currency of this piece of pop culture and how it may dictate our moments to come.

What does it say about the oral tradition and storytelling in general that the future characters in the play misremember and / or alter the plot to The Simpsons episode upon which they base their work? And, on a parallel track, can we trust the historical record of human life on Earth when it too may be subject to an equal amount of misattribution and / or "fictionalization?" Is the play at all a commentary on the unreliability of knowledge?

I believe this play is more of a commentary on how memory can become thwarted and warped with time. Through incredibly devastating life events, our memory of the distant or even recent past can wildly transform due to the fight or flight nature of survival we find ourselves in within the crumbling remains of a society. The show is a great example on how the art of oral tradition can withstand anything, it has the power to connect strangers and revive people's understanding of how they see the world through these stories. Oral tradition keeps stories and our experiences alive, and in this show that is essential in order to take the next step in this world.