Theater review: 'Mr. Burns’ is a sober, hilarious take on 'The Simpsons It’s a story told around a campfire, to tantalizingly woodsy but edgily-watchful effect in director Mark Rucker’s American Conservatory Theater West Coast premiere of “Mr. Burns, a post electric play” that opened Wednesday. [...] Anne Washburn’s blithely comic and thought-provoking play that turns into a musical is the most creatively extended episode of “The Simpsons” — some 82 years into a future after the last TV set has died — you’re ever likely to see. An intriguing post-apocalyptic tale, “Burns” combines a hilarious, ever-evolving re-enactment of the “Cape Feare” episode of Matt Groening’s impossibly long-running TV show with a sobering meditation on life among the survivors after a collapse of the electrical grid has led to successive meltdowns of America’s nuclear plants — one of which, you may remember, is the main industry of the town of Springfield in the animated sitcom. A disparate group of survivors has gathered around that campfire, trying to recount the “Cape Feare” story as a way to bond and avoid thoughts of radiation and missing friends and family. Seven years later, the same group has become a traveling acting troupe in a fiercely competitive world, augmented by Tracey A.