Interview: So Many Moving Parts: Reba Short Directs MR BURNS at Mad Horse Theatre

"This is probably the hardest play I have ever done," director Reba Short confides about her latest assignment, Mr. Burns, a Post Electric Play that opens at South Portland's Mad Horse Theatre Company Friday, May 5th. "There are so many moving parts to this play. I have had to call up every class ever took in college and every skill I've ever learned. It's a very complicated work that moves from realism to kabuki like stylization and takes place in three distinct realms and times. I completely understand why [playwright] Anne Washburn called it a 'beast of a play.'"

Short, who is not only a member of the Mad Horse ensemble, but also the Director of Theatre and Education at the Portland Museum Children's Theatre, is speaking about the process of staging the final work in what has been an adventurous season at Mad Horse. Washburn's award-winning dark comedy examines the notion of heroism in a post apocalyptic society and the process by which a society transforms itself and creates its own mythology.

"The central protagonist of the work," Short explains, 'is an episode of The Simpsons, and it is this story that goes through the hero's journey and morphs over the course of the play. Act 1 starts after a nuclear apocalypse has happened. Act 2 takes place seven years later and Act 3 seventy-five years after that, so by the end of the play the characters are now a different group of survivors and they have made The Simpsons into a religion."

Short says the play poses questions about "what we consider to be pop culture and how a society chooses its mythic figures." And if Bart Simpson seems an unlikely hero, Short sees him as the perfect "scrappy survivor" for this tale. "He is less a Hercules and more a Perseus," she opines. "Ultimately he comes face to face with Mr. Burns, the owner of nuclear plant, and the play becomes a story about choosing courage and fight over flight."

As these survivors refashion a familiar story into another one born of their needs and yearnings, they add music and ritual, eventually elevating the commonplace to the extraordinary. Music is integral to Mr. Burns, and this production will feature Portland blues musician Lex Jones and harpist Brittany Cook to bring the score to life. "The score is actually very complicated," Short says. " The music morphs in the same way the story does with the songs becoming increasingly integral. By the end, these tunes have been ritualized and used in a church setting and they mean something entirely different than they did when they first appeared." Another element in the gradual ritualization in the play is the use of masks, designed by Short, who draws on her extensive experience as a mask and puppet maker for the children's theatre. "Watching them worn by these actors who bring them to life has been thrilling."

And then besides these many layers, there is choreography by Christine Louise Marshall, a fight sequence by Jake Cote , set by Christopher Price, props by Katherine Saunier, lighting by Corey Anderson, and costumes by Janice Gardner all fusing for what Ben Brantley of the New York Times described in his 2013 review of the Playwrights Horizon production as feeling "both exhausted and exhilarated by the many layers of time and thought you've traveled through."

"I love plays where you are laughing and crying at the same time," Short says. "It's satisfying and challenging to find the balance as a director - not to lose the edge while still taking time for the moments of sun to shine."

As Short elaborates on the rehearsal process for Mr. Burns, she cannot help but reflect on how her work with children informs her perspective as a director. "I have been working with kids all my life. I am a teacher by heart, and I love using theatre as a teaching tool. In my nine years at the Children's Museum, I have been fascinated by how children use their imaginations in different ways as they grow. To four-year-olds, for example, their imaginations are real, and you can enter the imaginary context with them and become an actor in their story. What I love about working with kids is their spontaneity. They suspend disbelief automatically, and it's that spontaneity I want to create in my rehearsal process with adult actors. What I do with kids fuels everything else I do."

Short's work teaching theatre to young people goes back many years, and she recalls another pivotal experience in her life which shaped her artistic beliefs. After taking her degrees at Mt. Holyoke and Emerson College, Short joined the Peace Corps and was assigned to Morocco, where she found herself putting on plays in a youth house with children "who really needed a reason to survive. I found myself writing, adapting, directing, producing, getting people on board for our projects. I did more theatre there than I had ever done before that, and I made an important discovery for myself. I had gone to Morocco wondering if the rest of the world needed art and theatre, or if, in the scope of their lives, art was something frivolous. And I learned that theatre is NOT a frivolous pursuit, that it is important not just for a certain group of people, but as an vital survival tool for all of humankind."

And as Reba Short articulates that thought, she seems to have an epiphany which she shares: " Funny, it's like coming full circle because that's what Mr. Burns A Post Electric Play is really about."

Photos courtesy Reba Short and Mad Horse Theatre

Mr. Burns A Post Electric Play runs from May 4- 21, 2017 at Mad Horse theatre, 24 Mosher Street, South Portland www.madhorse.com 207-747-4