To distract themselves from mourning, they attempt to recount the episode "Cape Feare" of the TV show The Simpsons, as well as several other pieces of media.

Burns and his demonic henchmen Itchy & Scratchy sneak onto the boat and untie the mooring ropes, then begin killing the Simpsons one by one.

[2][3] For a long time, Washburn had been exploring what it would be like "to take a TV show and push it past the apocalypse and see what happened to it" and while she originally considered Friends, Cheers, and M*A*S*H, she ultimately settled on The Simpsons.

[4] Working with The Civilians theater company, who had commissioned the play, Washburn held a workshop for a week in 2008 with actors Matthew Maher, Maria Dizzia, and Jennifer R. Morris to see how much of any episode of The Simpsons they could remember.

[6] Washburn continued to revise the play for its European premiere at the Almeida Theatre in London in Spring 2014, and a new draft was published by Oberon Books.

[16] Mitchell Butel took the roles of Mr Burns and Gibson, while Paula Arundell, Esther Hannaford, Jude Henshall, Brent Hill, Ezra Juanta, and Jacqy Phillips making up the rest of the cast.

"[20] In Time, Richard Zoglin characterized the reaction to the show as receiving "some rave reviews, a few equally passionate dissents and sellout crowds.

"[21] Ben Brantley of The New York Times compared Mr. Burns to Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th-century book The Decameron in which a group of Italian youths have fled the Black Death to a villa where they begin to exchange stories.

[2] "At the end of Steve Cosson's vertiginous production, which opened on Sunday night at Playwrights Horizons, you’re likely to feel both exhausted and exhilarated from all the layers of time and thought you've traveled through", wrote Brantley.

[22] In his otherwise positive review, Brown noted that the play's "flabby middle act could use some tightening, to better dramatize Washburn’s talky deepthink.

She wrote that the show "challenges audiences to embrace the imaginative (if strange and alienating) scions, or adaptations, of cultural matter.

[28] "Although the play's postmodern mash-up of television, film, and theater is highly entertaining, its powerful ethics resides in seeing capitalism and consumerism (symbolized by the greedy Simpsons character Mr. Burns) as the causes of civilization's decay.