Saw Lightning Jar Theatre Inc.‘s production of Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play last night with Nadia. The space at fortyfivedownstairs is perfect for it. At once cavernous and intimate, you feel the warmth of the fire the characters gather around as much as you do every sound and every movement that has them reaching for weapons and looking over their shoulders. There’s sirens in the distance and trams rattling across roads – but it’s being broadcast from another world.

Over the course of the night we see stories transforming from something shared around a fireplace, to something sold for batteries and diet coke, to something entirely different in the chaotic third and final act. It’s an insanely good script, it was easy to see why the interval had us looking at how much it was to purchase online.

Messages on the transformative and reassuring nature of storytelling are not what you would expect from a play which uses The Simpsons as its main vehicle. But there it is. It’s also shockingly reassuring for a piece set in the apocalypse. As the characters squabble over purchasing lines and scenes in order to piece together episodes for what is now a kind of theatre troupe bringing something, anything, to the masses struggling through this post electric world – it strikes on a reality I always knew.

Stories are life blood. Stories survive and often thrive in situations like this, in situations where it feels like we’re tearing our world apart. Everyone finds something different in fiction. Reassurance, entertainment, therapy, a reflection of a part of you no one has ever known.

But what they find, no matter what, is something of themselves. And the fact is we’re just too damn stubborn to let those stories go – even in a world without electricity where every moment lasts a second and a thousand years all at once.