Get Her to the Greek

Some playwrights, notably Annie Baker, seem to write on the molecular level, building up from pauses, glances, and scraps of dialogue. Others, such as Itamar Moses, are more macro, toying with big ideas and structures and letting drama—or warped comedy—trickle down. The Berkeley-born playwright Anne Washburn does both, concocting extreme scenarios and filling them with keenly observed offhand speech. “10 out of 12,” which ran at SoHo Rep this summer, was set at a tech rehearsal for a play, which theatre people know to be excruciatingly boring but which, in Washburn’s hands, had an almost ritualistic beauty. Stranger was “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” a postmodern triptych, which was staged by the Civilians in 2013, at Playwrights Horizons. In the first act, survivors of a near-future apocalypse comfort themselves by recounting the plot of a “Simpsons” episode. In the second, society has begun to rebuild, and a makeshift theatre troupe turns the same episode into a barnyard entertainment. Then we leap seventy-five years forward: that episode has morphed into a full-blown operetta, and Bart, Homer, and company have become the new folkloric heroes, as archetypal as Adam and Eve. Civilization reboots. The oral tradition perseveres.