Burn This
Opening Night: April 16, 2019
Closing: July 14, 2019
Theater: Hudson Theatre
Academy Award nominee Adam Driver (BlacKkKlansman, Star Wars, “Girls”) and Golden Globe winner Keri Russell (“The Americans,” Waitress, “Felicity”) star in the acclaimed drama by Pulitzer Prize winner Lanford Wilson. When a mysterious death brings together two unlikely strangers, their explosive connection sparks a chemistry too fiery to ignore. Directed by Tony winner Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening, Hedwig and the Angry Inch), and co-starring Tony nominees David Furr and Brandon Uranowitz, BURN THIS is a smoldering story of love and raw attraction by one of the most vital playwrights of the modern era.
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April 16, 2019
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.
READ THE REVIEWApril 16, 2019
Driver moves through it all like his own weather system, maybe the most entertaining hurricane onstage this year so far. It’s too bad that the love story between Anna and Pale never completely convinces us that they are in fact, on fire; it sparks and smolders, but it’s not quite that kind of burn.
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April 16, 2019
So what’s needed? I’d say passion, or at least chemistry. But Russell’s Anna just hasn’t the emotional weight to provide the heft needed for an equal and opposite reaction to Driver’s Pale. She seems no more inescapably drawn to Pale than she was to Burton. Better she had stayed with that rich, handsome, doting stiff. They’d have had a nice little life.
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April 16, 2019
But even though Mayer has tightened the play from three hours in earlier productions down to a punchy two-and-a-half, it lacks the thematic resonance to deliver anything much beyond a magnetically performed love triangle. That’s partly because Robbie’s ghost is never vivid enough to truly haunt the characters; his loss quickly fades, diminishing the play’s melancholy undertow.
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April 16, 2019
The ache for an absent artist permeates Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This,” now receiving a finely-tuned Broadway revival that features incendiary performances by Adam Driver and Keri Russell, playing two lost souls in a powerful and passionate dance of denial.
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