Burn This

[edjames]

I remember seeing the original production with John Malkovich and being blown away by the intensity of his performance. It's on my "never to forget' theater moments. I looked for tickets for this production a while back but good seats, at a reasonable price, were hard to find. I might go back and look again.

 

Anyway, good reviews...

‘Burn This’ review: Adam Driver, Keri Russell sizzle in love dance

If you come to “Burn This” expecting fireworks from Adam Driver and Keri Russell, be patient: The play that opened on Broadway Tuesday night takes a while to combust.

Fresh from “The Americans,” Russell plays Anna, a dancer-turned-choreographer who’s mourning the freak-accident death of Robbie, her creative partner, roommate and gay BFF. Just back from his funeral, she rails against his family, who had never seen him dance, while her screenwriter boyfriend, Burton, drones on about his latest project. Her other gay roomie, Larry, serves up one quip after another — Robbie’s ornate casket, he says, “looked like a giant Spode soup tureen.”

We laugh, but wonder: When will Lanford Wilson’s 1987 play finally ignite?

It does some 20 minutes on, when Driver bursts in ranting as Pale, Robbie’s older brother. Menacing, profane and sexist — at least until we see what lies underneath — the New Jersey restaurant manager first comes to collect Robbie’s belongings, only to return for more of Anna. Amid grief, guilt and desire for fresh starts, opposites attract. But love never comes easy in plays by Wilson, the late Pulitzer Prize winner whose work specializes in funny, sad, warts-and-all stories of idiosyncratic men and women. This show has all that, as well as contrivances and speeches more colorful than convincing.

Michael Mayer’s fine cast plays up the humor, and then some. By hinting at the loneliness underlying Larry’s one-liners, Brandon Uranowitz makes the character more than a pre-“Will & Grace” sidekick, while David Furr, dashing and confident, holds his own in the fairly thankless role of Burton.

And Russell? She’s just plain beautiful in a star turn filled with the rich, emotional honesty that made her irresistible in TV’s “Felicity.” Her toned legs and exquisite arches make her look like the dancer she plays.

Driver, a theater actor long before he starred in TV’s “Girls” and started his Kylo Ren tour in “Star Wars,” gives a performance as wonderfully weird as it is vanity-free. He’s game for anything, emerging at one point in little more than some cheesy black BVDs.

He and Russell have palpable chemistry, even as the prospect of becoming a couple terrifies Anna and Pale. “I don’t want this,” each one says.

That we want it for them is a sign that “Burn This” isn’t just blowing smoke.

 

NYTimes to follow in separatenb post.

[edjames]

Ben Brantley, NYTimes, also has good things to say..

 

Review: Adam Driver Heats Up a Wobbly ‘Burn This’

Adam Driver is a great disrupter.

This volcanic actor’s entrance in the lopsided new revival of Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This,” which opened on Tuesday at the Hudson Theater, is prefaced by a fanfare of violent pounding. It is 5 a.m., in a loft in Lower Manhattan. And it sounds as if the Incredible Hulk, feeling very impatient, is in the hallway — or maybe a runaway cyclone.

When the door opens, what is revealed behind it does not disappoint. With long, flailing limbs and a face molten with anguish, Mr. Driver explodes into view with an outsize fury that makes everyone and everything around him seem Lilliputian. And a production that has so far felt pleasant and prosaic is flooded with the anarchy of life in extremis.

The last time I can recall such an impressively violent Broadway entrance was more than 30 years ago, when a rising actor named John Malkovich appeared in the same part. Playing a coked-to-the-gills restaurant manager named Pale, Mr. Malkovich seemed to morph overnight from quirky character actor into a leading man of dangerous sex appeal.

Theater lovers still talk about the excitement of that performance. And I would wager that decades from now, people will be speaking with the same gratified wonder of Mr. Driver’s very different but equally compelling Pale.

Though he has appeared on Broadway before, it has been in supporting roles in period British dramas — “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” (2010) and “Man and Boy” (2011) — that fitted him like genteel straitjackets. With “Burn This,” directed by Michael Mayer and co-starring Keri Russell, he is finally allowed to unfurl onstage the distinctive energy and insight that have characterized his subsequent performances in film (the current “Star Wars” series) and television (HBO’s “Girls”).

That unleashed force is plied most artfully here to create a portrait of how grief unhinges, disarranges and heightens everyday life. Set in the late 1980s, “Burn This” assesses the impact of the death of a young dancer named Robbie, Pale’s brother, in a boating accident.

The tragedy brings Robbie’s roommates, Anna (Ms. Russell, in the part for which Joan Allen won a Tony in 1988) and Larry (Brandon Uranowitz), as well Anna’s boyfriend, Burton (David Furr), into contact with someone they might otherwise never have met. That’s Pale, a product of working-class New Jersey who has had little recent contact with the much younger, artistic-minded and gay Robbie.

[Adam Driver and Keri Russell on the appeal of ‘Burn This.’]

The play begins shortly after Robbie’s funeral. Anna, who has recently made the transition from dancing to choreography, has returned to their apartment, a loft space as open as a dance studio and as lonely as a desert. (Derek McLane designed the set, lighted with a brooding clarity by Natasha Katz.) Having just met Robbie’s family for the first time, she’s marveling at how she could have known so little about someone she thought she knew so well.

The opacity of people — even to themselves — is a leitmotif in “Burn This.” So is the hunger to reach beyond the ordinary, to see and feel on an epic scale. Burton, a rich-boy screenwriter, and Anna speak of creating work that wrests them from the rut of what they’ve always done. They need, in Burton’s words, “to reach for the sun.”

As embodied by Mr. Driver, Pale isn’t reaching for the sun; he’s a solar entity unto himself. You believe him when he says his normal body temperature is about 110 degrees and that “I got like a toaster oven that I carry around in my belly someplace.”

Addled with drug and drink, rabid with grief and guilt, Pale arrives — in the play’s second scene, to collect his brother’s belongings — as a flesh-and-blood example of life lived large. He’s an alien in the civilized Bohemia of the others.

He’s even an alien to himself, wrestling in exasperation with his own body, which registers emotions as physical pain, and the Armani-style duds he always wears. (Clint Ramos did the era-appropriate costumes.) Even more than Mr. Malkovich did, Mr. Driver makes us aware that real grandeur doesn’t always come in the expected, esthetically pleasing packages.

If Mr. Driver bestrides “Burn This” like a colossus — could he really be only 6-foot-2, as Wikipedia has it? — everyone else seems to shrink beneath his shadow when he’s onstage. You could argue that this is appropriate.

But earlier productions — including the 2002 Signature Theater revival, which starred Edward Norton and Catherine Keener — made it clear that this drama is indeed a “pas de quatre,” to use the language of dance, about the distance among people. In Mr. Mayer’s version, the play might be titled “Waiting for Pale.”

This is partly because Ms. Russell, a first-rate television actress

never seems in any way undone — not by sorrow, not by creative frustration and not by her character’s gravitational attraction to Pale, with whom she falls into bed almost immediately. She tells Pale that he scares her.

Yet despite her physical daintiness in comparison to Mr. Driver’s looming heft, her Anna always seems in charge, like a nanny with an unruly, overgrown toddler. To borrow from Lady Gaga, Ms. Russell’s performance remains comfortably “in the shallow,” instead of in the deep end into which Anna is plunged.

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When she deftly swaps chummy barbs with Mr. Uranowitz — who ably fills the now shopworn role of the sardonic but ultimately wise and caring gay confidant — “Burn This” can feel like a dry run for the long-lived TV series “Will and Grace.” And the most intriguing erotic chemistry here isn’t between Pale and Anna, but between Larry and Mr. Furr’s straight (and very good) Burton.

This is partly because Ms. Russell, a first-rate television actress

never seems in any way undone — not by sorrow, not by creative frustration and not by her character’s gravitational attraction to Pale, with whom she falls into bed almost immediately. She tells Pale that he scares her.

I hasten to add that Mr. Driver isn’t grandstanding at the expense of the rest of the cast. Part of the pleasure of watching him comes from seeing how this overwrought lug relates so awkwardly and unnaturally to others. When he kisses Anna goodbye, it’s with the stiffness of a little boy unaccustomed to displays of affection.

But this “Burn This,” which is steeped in the rich compassion for the lonely and lost that is the hallmark of works by Mr. Wilson (1937-2011),only rarely stirs the heart. In the ideal production, it creates the sense of fire meeting fire in a folie à deux between two ill-matched yet inexorably bound lovers. What we have in this case is a one-man conflagration.

[edjames]

Caught yesterdy's matinee performance and was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed this production.

I saw the original with Joan Allen and John Malkovich waaaay back when (1984, I seem to remember).

I was blown away by Malkovich's performance.

Adam Driver is good but he's no Malkovich (sorry to say). BUT, I did enjoy the entire cast, especially Keri Russell, and Brandon Uranowitz.

It's a strange tale but filled with funny moments (thanks to the character of Larry) and Mr. Driver captures the essence of a man completely lost in a drug and alcohol fueled world spinning out of control.

The show ends its run on June 30th.