Theater Review: Lanford Wilson's Burn This with a fiery Adam Driver

Burn This

Written by Lanford Wilson

Directed by Michael Mayer

Starring Adam Driver and Keri Russell

Hudson Theater, Manhattan

May 5, 2019

Playwright Lanford Wilson (1937-2011) specialized in realism, featuring earthy, flawed Americans in real world situations. Plays like Talley’s Folley, Fifth of July, and The Hot l Baltimore presented a cross section of middle class America to playgoers in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Presumably, the fantasy USA of the Reagan era caused his earthy plays go out of fashion, so his plays were not often revived in the following years. But these days our increasing attention to “forgotten” middle class issues has made this a hot topic, so the timing seemed good to revive the 1987 play Burn This. This production, featuring two of the hottest millennial actors, was entertaining and allowed us to enjoy the talents of Adam Driver up close, and volcanically personal.

The play centers on a group of young Manhattan housemates trying to make it in the big city. Their career obsessions and frustrating blockades to reaching their self-perceived full potential certainly resonate with the real-world frustrations of today’s young adults. Like millennials, these 1970’s characters believe they can do anything, but seem stifled in the real world of the workplace. A death interrupts this stable tribe—a gay roommate and his lover are killed in an accident—and the roommate’s older brother Pale (Mr. Driver) shows up from New Jersey (his foreignness could make him from Sri Lanka) to take care of his brother’s business. Pale proceeds to pretty much blow up everything, entering into a sexual liaison with the engaged Anna (Keri Russell), moving into the flat for a while, and generally bringing more grown up, real world, and bipolar middle-class anger and resentment to the entitled little group of youth. Pale is contemptuous of the young Manhattanite’s affectations and narcissism, but is too erratic to get his own life together managing a restaurant in New Jersey. The role of Pale is notable for its heated New York-style meltdowns, broadsides, and rants, and the talented Mr. Driver (Girls, Star Wars, Lincoln, BlacKkKlansman) carries this off well, dominating the stage. I think he was a better choice for this role than the originally cast Jake Gyllenhaal, who had to withdraw. The squeals of the young audience when Mr. Driver appeared made me thing of a rock concert—he seems to be the millennial James Dean or Dustin Hoffman. The play moves crisply through a series of relationships, career disasters, and reconciliations, so is at heart a pretty conventional coming-of-age drama. Its style is of an angry romantic comedy, so provides enough change of pace to avoid TV predictability, but just barely.

There is nothing particularly special about this play, or its insights, but it provides a great star turn for the role of Pale. The problem in such situations (see Glenda Jackson in King Lear) is how to integrate and amplify the other characters so the play becomes more than a character study of one person. The playwright didn’t help much here, but I think a director or better casting could have made it more of an ensemble. Kerri Russell (Felicity, The Americans) is a good actress, but got buried under Mr. Driver, and I think picking a bitchier type for her role might have worked better, and created more combustible sexual tension, which was lukewarm here.  The director and production design pretty much stayed out of the way of Mr. Driver. I’d like to see more of Lanford Wilson’s plays, as they do resonate well in our time. He seems to have a good eye on how to skewer hypocrisy, narcissism, and self-importance, and we need more plays like that in an era where our president more centers on himself than on any given value, policy, or interest group. I think a smaller scale production in an off-Broadway theater would better communicate the playwright’s acerbic messages, and I hope that NYC companies will do some revivals of his other plays soon.