Understanding Genre in Mr. Burns: Blending Sitcom and Apocalypse on Stage
About Me
Hello! I'm Shannon Bingham and this website is serving as my senior Honors Project. My goal for this site was to create an educational resource to better understand Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play. As a performance studies major, I am learning to approach theatre by seeking an understanding of all facets of this artistic craft. Getting to the heart of a complex play like this one requires the research and context of past and present pop culture to understand this play's place in its time. I knew I wanted to do a project based in dramaturgy because it is one of the facets of theatre I was least familiar with, and what better way to learn by doing? I read Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play in my intro script analysis class, and the complexity of the play stuck with me. When I learned our department was putting on this show in the Fall of 2019, I remembered when I read it for the first time, I was left with more questions than answers about this play. I wanted to get to the bottom of the choices made in this text. Thus, I had the idea for my honors project.
About the Project
This website is serving as my senior capstone honors project. The honors project is required for honors students, like me, to graduate BGSU with honors. Since this project can be in any form or subject, I wanted to create a dramaturgical research project that can extend beyond the run of one production. Often in educational theatre, we see dramaturgy projects in the form of lobby displays or presentations to the cast of a production. What is often seen visually is usually the tip of the iceberg in a laundry list of research and theory associated with the process.
My goal for this project is to showcase more of the research side of dramaturgy as well as integrate other disciplines and methodologies of study into this project. I chose to make this project into a website so I could compile information and make it accessible virtually. This website partly serves a generalized dramaturgical purpose, to understand this play and its relevance in our world. However, it focuses on provoking thought about the aesthetic choices used by the playwright and why these creative choices are relevant to the story told and the way we experience the world. This website is a curation of the research I examined for this project, and there is a lot of information and opinion on the questions I am trying to unpack. Some of these questions don't have one clear answer, but hopefully this website can provide some context or clarify the complex world of the play. Enjoy!
