Anne Washburn
American playwright Anne Washburn grew up in Berkeley, California, went to Reed College, and obtained an MFA degree from New York University.
Ms. Washburn's 2012 play, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, received a Drama League Award nomination for Outstanding Production. The New York Times praised it as "downright brilliant." In Washburn's words, the play takes place "after the fall of civilization as we know it," and traces how a post-disaster society rebuilds through reworked stories and myths. "What would happen," Washburn asks, "to a piece of pop culture if you pushed it after the apocalypse and kept pushing?
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Anne Washburn's plays include Mr. Burns, The Internationalist, A Devil At Noon, Apparition, and much more which have been produced by groups such as 13P, Actors Theater of Louisville, American Repertory Theatre, and Playwrights Horizons. Awards include a Guggenheim, a NYFA Fellowship, a Time Warner Fellowship, Susan Smith Blackburn finalist, and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo. She is an associated artist with The Civilians, Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, and is an alumna of New Dramatists and 13P. (More)
Interview quotes
"that language of trying to remember something is so specific and wonderful and delightful"
"we plunked this group of actors together in this weirdo rehearsal space in a bank vault underneath Wall Street [...] It was very post-apocalypse. Our cellphones didn’t work in there. We were in a literal bank vault, with a huge door to it. The lights flickered. It was incredible, kind of great and horrifying."
"Even before we got the actors together in the room, the show was still called Mr. Burns. So I didn’t know how it was going to end or what was going to happen at the ending, but I knew that Mr. Burns was a central figure of it somewhere, the central villain."
"just such a deeply primitive story: It’s a family on a river, with a killer. So it’s horrifying in that way, and also in a post-apocalyptic time of poor societal control, it would really feel right."
"It references a million other things as well, like any of them do. But it’s easier to put together in your head, because it retains this kind of ancient lineage of the remake of Cape Fear and the original Cape Fear and Night of the Hunter. It has this core running through it."
"But this episode was written at the very end of season five, when that initial writer’s room was just about to go. They kind of figured, “Fuck it.” They wanted to do an episode that centered more around one movie."
"Also, it’s funny. It’s a place you would want to go if everything around you was dark and unholy."
"I felt a similar way in the pandemic [...] We all obeyed the same rules at the same time. So in that way it felt recollective to me of groupthink, or the ways we all operate as animals when we’re in crisis and decide to do the same thing."
"Commercials are kind of incredible. They’re an incredibly useful way to create suspense within a narrative."
"I felt like the villain in the third act would be a figure which would reflect the fears of that world, would articulate the dangers which aren’t going away. In Night of the Hunter, he’s a force who’s noncivilized. Robert Mitchum who becomes Robert de Niro who becomes Sideshow Bob: he’s uncontainable. He can’t be controlled by society. If you expand that to all the forces who can’t be controlled in Act 3, that’s what that figure can circle around. It’s social stuff, it’s violence, it’s everything that can’t be regulated by law. It’s environmental damage. All of the darknesses which are invisible."
"If something’s worth something you’re going to be protective of it, and art is always worth something."
