There’s a gorgeous moment in Burn This between Keri Russell, Adam Driver, and a book of matches. Russell’s character, dancer-turned-choreographer Anna, is struggling to start a fire. Driver’s Pale, the volatile brother of Anna’s late roommate, leans in and strikes a match. And for a few brief blazing seconds, you can practically see sparks fly.
Unfortunately, that heated moment happens in the final scene. Otherwise, Russell and Driver possess precious little chemistry in Michael Mayer’s tepid revival of Lanford Wilson’s 1987 play.
When we first meet Anna, she’s grieving the loss of her roommate, dance partner, and friend Robbie, who died in a boating accident with his lover Dom. She’s assuaging her anger with vodka and complaints—railing against the tacky coffin (“There was this great baroque maroon-and-gold casket with these ormolu geegaws all over it”), the clueless family (“In about eight seconds I know they have no idea that Robbie’s gay”), and her miscasting as the grieving widow (“I’d have given fifty dollars for a veil”). Her boyfriend, moneyed screenwriter Burton (David Furr), is there to listen.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★ review here.]
Her other roommate, ad exec Larry (Brandon Uranowitz, making the most of the clichéd gay sidekick role), is there to offer support and quips where necessary; he concurs on the tacky coffin: “It looked like a giant Spode soup tureen.” She’s tired. She’s hurting. So when Pale bursts in like a bat out of hell—ostensibly to retrieve his late brother’s belongings—it’s not terribly surprising that Anna quickly succumbs to his peculiar charms. And they are indeed peculiar. Pale on Anna, Larry, and Robbie’s loft apartment: “He lived in this joint? I mean no personal disparagement of the neighborhood in which you have your domicile, honey, but this street’s dying of crotch rot.… Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s supposed to be arty, I know. It’s quaint. Look at it—you should make automobile parts here. It’s a fuckin’ factory.”
Driver—a recent Oscar nominee for Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, and a megastar thanks to his role as Kylo Ren, née Ben Solo, in the Star Wars films—has always been a fine stage actor (highlights: 2009’s The Retributionists and 2012’s Look Back in Anger), but he’s a veritable force here. He makes the most of Pale’s cocaine-fueled quirkiness—pulling off his $245 “genuine lizard shoes” that are “fuckin’ killing” his foot, demanding to know why because “you’d think a lizard’s got to be supple, right?”—without taking it over the top. And he seems to have a genuine rapport with TV vet Russell (Felicity, The Americans), who’s perhaps too inhibited but considerably more at ease than she was 15 years ago in Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig. (Though she spends way too much time playing with her hair.)
Despite what the promos for this revival would have you believe, the actors playing Pale and Anna don’t necessarily require house-on-fire chemistry. Wilson didn’t write a smoldering love story. He wrote a romantic comedy—and what they need is a burning need for each other. They both have massive holes in their lives thanks to Robbie’s death. They’re broken. (At one point, Anna even likens Pale to a bird with a broken wing.) Think Frankie and Johnny. Actually, it’s fitting that Terrence McNally wrote a program note for this production; the unlikely lovers in his Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, which also premiered off-Broadway in 1987, are cut from the same cloth as Anna and Pale. This “love shit”—as Wilson once described the crux of Burn This—is tricky business.
Burn This opened April 16, 2019, at the Hudson Theatre and runs through July 14. Tickets and information: burnthisplay.com
