‘Burn This’ fails to catch fire
Over the past couple of decades, the plays of Lanford Wilson have been conspicuous by their absence from Bostonarea theaters.
Hub Theatre Company of Boston is currently seeking to redress that state of affairs by staging Wilson’s “Burn This.” Kudos to the company’s tireless founder and producing artistic director, Lauren Elias, for doing so.
If only the play were better.
As it is, “Burn This” registers as a mechanically assembled contraption that travels in increasingly repetitive circles, defeating the best efforts of director Daniel Bourque and two of the most interesting actors around, Kiki Samko and Victor L. Shopov.
Samko plays Anna, a dancer-choreographer who has been sharing a Manhattan apartment with two gay roommates: Larry (Steve Auger), an advertising executive, and Robbie, her close friend and collaborator, who has just been killed in a freak boating accident.
Anna is deep in mourning, almost broken. Larry, too, is devastated. They go into great detail as they describe Robbie’s funeral to Burton (Tim Hoover), Anna’s screenwriter boyfriend. And then Anna goes into similarly extensive detail about the post-funeral gathering with Robbie’s family.
Now, it’s seldom a good idea, dramaturgically speaking, to spend large chunks of time at the start of a play — when the audience is just getting to know you — for a protagonist to go on and on about characters whom the people in the seats cannot see and will never see.
It usually — not always, but usually — tends to limit our investment and inhibits a play’s chance to build the kind of forward momentum that can carry the audience along with it. At “Burn This,” tedium sets in, and you can feel the air coming out of the production.
The play shifts into a higher gear, temporarily, when Robbie’s brother, a restaurant manager named Pale (Shopov), shows up. Pale doesn’t so much walk into the apartment as erupt into it, all alpha edges and furious energy, talking a mile a minute, and generally seeming to have wandered in from a David Mamet play. (Indeed, Pale’s entrance is markedly similar to the way Teach bursts into the pawn shop in “American Buffalo.”)
Beneath his volatility and bluster, Pale is wrestling with his own sadness and unresolved issues with his late brother (at least partly, it appears, stemming from his inability to accept Robbie’s homosexuality).
For Anna and Pale, grief and lust eventually commingle, and we’ve got ourselves a love triangle. The workingout of that triangle — Burton, an egocentric chap, is not pleased by the turn of events — forms the substance of much of what remains of “Burn This.”
But too often the conflicts between Anna and Pale feel like contrived plot devices, a way to keep the pyrotechnics going while Wilson figures out what his play should truly be about. The result is a certain shapelessness and a spinning of narrative wheels.
This is not primarily a case of a play failing to withstand the test of time. The shortcomings of “Burn This” were evident way back in 1987, when it premiered on Broadway with John Malkovich and the great Joan Allen as Pale and Anna. A Broadway revival five years ago starred Adam Driver and Keri Russell.
Wilson, who died at 73 in 2011, was a theater figure to reckon with for decades, beginning in the mid-1960s. Boldface names and on-the-rise performers alike were drawn to his work. Regional theaters vied for the chance to add a Wilson play to their seasons.
Long before Richard Nelson’s Apple Family cycle, Wilson wrote a trilogy about the fictional Talley family, consisting of “Talley’s Folly,” “Fifth of July,” and “Talley & Son.”
“Talley’s Folly,” a romantic comedy that starred Judd Hirsch and Trish Hawkins as an outwardly mismatched couple making their fumbling way to love in 1940s Missouri, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. During that same year, “Fifth of July” was presented on Broadway, with Christopher Reeve in the lead role as a gay paraplegic veteran of the Vietnam War, and a cast that also featured Jeff Daniels and Swoosie Kurtz. “Fifth of July” ran for more than 500 performances.
Wilson’s 1973 off-Broadway hit “Hot L Baltimore” inspired an ABC comedy in 1975, with none other than Norman Lear as an executive producer. It ran only half a season, though, a rare flop for Lear in a decade when he often had the Midas touch when it came to sitcoms.
For long stretches of his career, Wilson possessed a Midas touch of his own, when it came to theater. But not with “Burn This.”