“Mr. Burns, a post-electric play” Shines Bright Through Inspiration and Collaboration

Jeff Storer, professor of the practice in Theater Studies, first produced “Mr. Burns, a post-electric play” on another planet.

It was 2013, and Storer was directing Anne Washburn’s newly written play for Manbites Dog Theater. The tale, described by the author as a “pop culture narrative pushed past the fall of civilization,” is set in a near future where the world has been decimated by a global pandemic. Washburn’s characters use their memories of the TV show “The Simpsons” to create a new mythology, which they enact for other scattered survivors living in a world without electricity and where digital media is a thing of the past.

Twelve years later, Storer is directing “Mr. Burns” again, this time as Theater Studies’ Fall 2025 Mainstage production. But the COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed the world this cast, crew and audience inhabit.

“In 2013, we had not lived through what we experienced with COVID, and since the aftermath of a pandemic is at the core of the play, I think both artists preparing this piece and audiences seeing it are going to have a very different experience this time around,” Storer said. “In 2013, such a future was just speculation. Now, we all have an understanding of what can actually happen.”

The future is dark in “Mr. Burns, a post-electric play.” Literally. Until the third act, the only light in the world of the play comes from natural sources. Lighting designer Bill Webb, who joined the Theater Studies faculty in 2023, took on the challenge of illuminating Sheafer Theater’s stage to evoke firelight in the first act and sunlight in the second.

Webb and colleagues Ethan Eldred, Hannah Haverkamp and Thom Quintas — all recent hires in theater production and management — are changing the face of the Theater Studies department. Their expertise opens new avenues to students who are interested in pursuing research in technical theater.

The challenge of embodying light

Annie Lee is trying to figure out the best way to incorporate lights into costumes some of the characters will wear in the third act of “Mr. Burns.” 

Her contributions to the play are part of her senior distinction project, supervised by Ethan Eldred. A double major in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Theater Studies, Lee’s goal is to develop wearable sensors to enable intuitive interactions between performers and stage technicians. Working on “Mr. Burns” is only the first phase of the project, Eldred explained.

“Annie is working on a system of wearable devices that have LED lights in them. In ‘Mr. Burns,’ she is putting the controls in the hands of Bill Webb, the lighting designer, who will be able to turn them on or off from the lighting booth. He will be controlling the lights, rather than the actors. But Annie's long-term goal is for artists to be wearing lights they control themselves. This involves sensors picking up data from the artists’ movements and expressing that data through light.”

The idea at the heart the project came to Lee during her first year at Duke, when she decided to incorporate lights into her outfit for the Pratt School of Engineering’s annual ball. “I'd just learned some ballroom dancing, and I wanted to wear something that would react to the way I was dancing,” she said. Two years later, she began an independent study in Electrical & Computer Engineering, developing hardware that pushed her research in this area even further.

Lee had also taken Performance Studies, which piqued her interest in combining performance aspects with technology. “Acting and tech can be seen as really separate in theater, in the way we think of creatives and how we think of the crew,” she said. Lee noted that while audiences expect actors’ performances to be slightly different each time — inspired and “in the moment” — we expect technical aspects like lighting cues to be predictable and unchanging.

“The thing that makes live performances really special are that each one is unique and exists only in the here and now, and that's part of the experience,” Lee said. “I became really interested in how we can take the technology side — the lighting, the sound, things like that — and marry it to the live aspects of performance.”

Encouraging collaboration and interdisciplinarity

Lee is looking forward to seeing how the wearable lighting effects she’s been collaborating on with costume designer Derrick Ivey and costume shop director Hannah Haverkamp will play out in the climactic final act of “Mr. Burns.” 

“It’s been a lot of fun to work with people like Derrick and to see how our designs have changed and evolved,” she said. Lee drew from an extensive toolbox to find practical solutions that would require Ivey to make as few compromises to his vision as possible. “I have experience with different types of lighting: flexible LED filaments, classic LED strips, addressable fairy lights, woven LED tape, as well as large lights, diffusers and reflectors,” she said.

For Storer, Lee’s contributions add an exciting dimension he didn’t have at his disposal when he directed the play 12 years ago.

“I am so thankful that someone as talented as Annie is doing research in an area which is the future of technology,” he said. “Without Annie, we would have to figure out how to run electrical cords off of the costumes. Each character would have to be in a particular place on the stage. What Annie has created is a method by which those costume pieces can be lit up by signal, so the actors’ movements aren’t confined.”

Storer believes Theater Studies will see more seniors conducting distinction projects like Lee’s in the coming years. 

“I think Annie’s ability to do a distinction project of this type is a result of hiring teaching artists who help our students navigate understanding both tech and design within the context of Theater Studies,” he said. “Because of this resource, we now have students who are more interested in pursuing technical theater and are combining it with other things Duke offers — like understanding that an engineering degree has applications within the Theater Studies program.”

Lee’s goal after graduation is to be on the cutting edge of a growing trend to incorporate more technology into theatrical productions.

“Ideally, I'd like to be doing something that combines theater and engineering, like continuing to develop microcontrollers and sensors that performers can wear on stage,” she said.

This type of theater, with a heavier integration of technology, is becoming more and more common.

“There's been a big rise in immersive and interactive theater, groups like Punchdrunk, or performances like Life and Trust,” Lee noted. “Some of these performances incorporate thousands of lights that are controlled everywhere in the theater. I'd love to see myself designing something like that.”