A Play and a Movie

Now that the craziness over healthcare is (mostly) passed, it’s time to turn to other more fun topics.

Last Saturday afternoon, Rachel and I came downtown to see a show at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre, a wonderful theatre in Penn Quarter, two blocks from my office. The show was “Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play” about the aftermath of an apocalypse and how fragments of American pop culture, in this case The Simpsons, might survive. Here’s how the Washington Post Express describes the show in today’s paper:

“Mr. Burns . . . is Woolly Mammoth’s best play since 2010’s “Clybourne Park.” The latter just won the Tony Award for Best Play, so you should get to “Mr. Burns” before its run ends. It’s terrifically smart and funny, and after it takes Broadway by storm, you can nonchalantly let it slip that you saw the world premiere.”

We enjoyed the play which was indeed clever and funny. As a skeptic and history guy, I appreciated the last act which made a point of how events, stories and ideas are inevitably morphed by time and fading memory into something almost unrecognizable. (Cough, the Bible, Cough.) Last night we enjoyed rewatching the awesome Simpsons episode the play uses as its focus, “Cape Feare”, aka the one where Sideshow Bob stalks Bart, even through the Witness Relocation Program, and with lots of HMS Pinafore, in a parody of the movie Cape Fear.

After we returned to Maryland via Metro, Rachel and I met Carol and Ben for dinner and then went to see Pixar’s BRAVE. BRAVE was, of course, incredibly beautiful and lush in its visuals, and was very funny. The story was a little simpler than I expected, but took some turns I didn’t expect. In many ways it flips the traditional Disney princess storyline on its head (but not in a self-aware, ironic way) and for that I appreciated it. I expect it to become even more rich on repeated viewings; a worthy addition to Pixar’s unparalleled catalog.