Burn This NYC Reviews and Tickets

"If Driver bestrides 'Burn This' like a colossus — everyone else seems to shrink beneath his shadow when he’s onstage....Mayer’s version, the play might be titled 'Waiting for Pale.' This is partly because Ms. Russell...never seems in any way undone...This 'Burn This'...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 more

“Driver gives it everything he’s got. He’s terrific, and slightly terrifying...Pale is irresistible to Anna, too, and that’s where the Broadway revival of Lanford Wilson’s 1987 quasi-romance bumps up against its own limitations...The play features highly actable parts...Yet Anna is, for the most part, a noncharacter...After an angry first scene, she fades into a frustrating gray...Anna exists to be fought over and passed around, and even when she asserts herself, she is not to be believed.”
Read more

“Mayer’s revival...is pretty dang good — mostly because, playing the human furnace at its center, Adam Driver is straight-up great...The play’s inherent risk, though, is that Pale will eclipse Anna by sheer force of personality, and despite Russell’s best efforts, this ‘Burn This’ is indeed Driver’s show...Driver keeps the show aloft...And he’s funny as heck...Driver’s performance is certainly this production’s crown jewel.”
Read more

"No amount of high-class craftsmanship can conceal the fact that 'Burn This' is a smiley-faced variation on 'A Streetcar Named Desire'...The four parts are respectively played by Keri Russell, Adam Driver, David Furr and Brandon Uranowitz, all of whose performances have a shallow, one-notey feel. While I suspect that Michael Mayer’s direction is at least as much to blame for their collective lack of intensity, Mr. Driver is glaringly miscast as Pale."
Read more

“’Burn This’s’ flaws have been there from the start...Russell, so good in 'The Americans', is just no match for either Driver or the stage. Her performance here is flat, her delivery single-note...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.”
Read more

“There is very much to like about Driver’s performance...The problem with this production is that it doesn't spend enough time at either end of the dial...While I don't doubt some will rail against ‘Burn/This’ and its tropes as a dated piece...Wilson was so compassionate and haunting a writer that his play was, and is, filled with comfort, and some challenge, for everyone. As its title implies, 'Burn/This' is complex and dangerous; it is worth more risk.”
Read more

“A finely-tuned revival that features incendiary performances by Driver and Russell, playing two lost souls in a powerful and passionate dance of denial...Vital to the success of this fascinating, flawed and overlong play is the casting, especially in the leads that require an audience to believe that such disparate people can find a safe haven in each other’s arms...Driver is riveting here, and audiences will identify with Anna’s dilemma of both wanting him to leave and needing him to stay.”
Read more

“In a performance of astonishing physicality...Driver maintains that dangerous energy...It's a credit then to the luminous Russell and the two supporting actors that nobody gets swallowed up in Pale's vortex...Wilson's play remains a compelling account of love...In choosing to dial up the humor, Mayer has undercut the anguish that is the drama's foundation, exposing ‘Burn This’ as just a circuitous journey to an inevitable romantic conclusion...Still, this is a dynamic production.”
Read more