Parody In Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns

Anne Washburn’s new hit play “Mr Burns” is a vision of an American future set in a post-apocalyptic world. Beginning of the play the characters are currently surviving a mass failure of nuclear power plant across the country. Gathered around the fire these random individuals are recalling an old episode of ‘Cape Fear’ in ‘The Simpsons’ T.V show, in which Bart is being stalked by a murderous Sideshow Bob. Anne Washburn has used these dramatic stylistic features to analyse the desire for community, influenced the power of parody, the importance of memory and positioned future of humanity.
Firstly an expression of Anne Washburn positioning the audience to read the play in a particular way is the desire for community. Characters throughout the play rely on the episode of ‘cape fear’ to recognise a world before the nuclear disaster. Slowly shifting away from reality to the confide spaces of their

Exaggerated imitation becomes absurd, an example of this would be the policemen putting squirrels down his pants and this is prime comedy because of the absurdity mixed in with confusion. The intention is to reduce the subject of the joke. The parody itself changes to be satire. Anne Washburn has indirectly used dominant influences of this day and age to insight the viewer. The reader can easily realise the parody component to “The Simpsons”, the T.V series uses real-life situations and creates a parody of the scenario, hence making the audience laugh at the imitating situation, as most episodes in “The Simpsons” series are based upon illusion within an illusion, very much like Anne Washburn who fundamentally characterised by literally and pop-culture illusion, a reference within a reference. Anne Washburn essentially is using existing text inspired by the character in certain episodes (Sideshow Bob) to convey her play