Like many critics, I was won over by Washburn’s agile, boisterous storytelling and her tangled, semi-redemptive vision of how humans would respond to the end of the world as we know it. Burns” twice in the Before Times - in 2013, at Playwrights Horizons in New York, and, in 2015, which was Wechsler’s previous Theater Wit production. But he has also found new comfort in its meaning. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” Anne Washburn’s 2012 apocalyptic phantasmagoria about hope, storytelling and “The Simpsons.” At Theater Wit in Chicago, Jeremy Wechsler, its longtime artistic director, is offering an expressive new staging that leans on the horror of the last 18 months to draw out the work’s fresh urgency.
Or at least that is what I was thinking as I watched this pandemic-era production of “Mr. And then there is the dread about what will happen next. CHICAGO - One of the most unbearable things about the pandemic is the uncertainty: about what we can and cannot do, and the way our understanding of what is going on gets tangled in conflicting stories or collapses altogether.
