There have been many artists whose work has made bold claims for the necessity of art in society. Perhaps none in recent memory have done so with more urgency and deftness than New York playwright Anne Washburn, whose 2012 apocalyptic musical drama Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play is currently on stage at ACT Theatre.

The work is composed of three acts. The first occurs shortly after a nuclear disaster has brought civilization to an abrupt end. The second revisits humanity seven years later. The third imagines a theatrical production staged 75 years hence. In the absence of electricity, infrastructure or rule of law—and in the face of chaos and abject terror—the remaining men and women, desperate to account for their new reality, turn to The Simpsons. A verbal retelling of a single episode of the long-running animated television sitcom begins as a diversion from collective shock and trauma, morphs into reenactment and exegesis, and ultimately evolves into a cathartic expression of their human predicament in the high art form of tragedy.

In his essay “The Birth of Tragedy,” Nietzsche said, “The metaphysical comfort—with which, I am suggesting even now, every true tragedy leaves us—that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable—this comfort appears in incarnate clarity in the chorus of the satyrs, a chorus of natural beings who live ineradicably, as it were, behind all civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and of the history of nations.” Out of context, one might think he was talking not about satyrs but about The Simpsons. Over the course of 27 seasons, the series has functioned both as popular entertainment and as a vehicle for appropriating trending culture and ideas, anchoring them through humor and irony in a more familiar context of human experience.

In the first scene, a group of the survivors of a nuclear Armageddon huddle around a fire in coats, hats and sweaters, drinking the remaining bottles of beer. One man begins to share his recollection of the plot of the famous Cape Feare episode, from season five. It is based, of course, on the 1991 movie Cape Fear, which was itself a remake of a 1962 movie of the same name. The plot involves a released convict who seeks revenge upon his former attorney and his family while they are on vacation in Florida. It is the rare horror film that taps into American’s fears of class difference and its potential for strife. In The Simpsons‘ version, the arch, hapless bad guy Sideshow Bob is cast as the villain, who hopes to kill Bart.

The retelling of Cape Feare puts the survivors at ease until they are interrupted by a visitor and draw their guns. The narration of the episode is replaced by the man’s harrowing tale of his journey through the death and ruins of what was once New England. The survivors take turns reading off the names of family members and friends on the remote chance that he has seen them, only to be let down by his reply. Breaking the silence that follows, the visitor resumes reciting the show’s dialogue as smiles return to their anguished faces. Could this scene resemble the birth of an oral tradition among our ancestors many millennia ago as they sought to make sense of the natural world around them?

In the second scene, the survivors, functioning contentiously as actors, directors and stagehands, struggle to painstakingly re-enact a television commercial from the time of the episode. During a break from their eternal rehearsal, they discuss a violence-ridden barter economy where scenes and lines are bought or traded between cells seeking to recreate episodes as they pass out of the collective memory. At one point, the actors suddenly change out of Simpsons’ costumes and break out into a randomly assembled music video dance medley wearing a mishmash of glam-rock, punk and hip-hop outfits. It’s a relief from the dramatic effort that precedes it, but the action comes to an end when invaders, possibly a rival cell, break into the compound and a gunfight ensues.

By the third and final scene, this experience of a dangerous, uncertain world has become fully integrated into the survivors’ art. Music, dance and poetic language coalesce in the form of Greek tragedy as Cape Feare becomes both mythology and cosmology. Mr. Burns, taking the form of an angry, avenging deity, replaces Sideshow Bob (he owned the earth-destroying nuclear plant, after all) and is flanked by a chthonic Itchy and Scratchy, who serve as his chorus. In the end, Bart must do battle alone with his father’s master on the deck of the unmanned vessel as it careens towards destruction. For our survivors, the art has finally risen to the terror of their occasion.

One of the more remarkable aspects of Mr. Burns is the inverted trajectory of Cape Feare‘s literary evolution and the connections it makes between high and low forms of art. We think of Greek tragedy as the origin of drama in the West and among our most significant artistic achievements. Talking today about television episodes that aired two decades ago is a more recent and less noteworthy phenomenon. But here, post-civilization, tragedy grows from memories of distant broadcasts.

In Mr. Burns, Washburn asks us to imagine how storytelling and the medium of drama might be transformed in the face of catastrophic events and dares us to conceive of how we might survive without them under any circumstances.