Burn This NYC Reviews and Tickets

"It’s not a perfect rendering, but with Adam Driver as Pale, the evening is thrilling, and the conversations on fire. He’s as compelling and fascinating as you would hope, but with Anna in the arms of Russell, working a bit too hard as if someone told her to remember to project and enunciate, which she does, in abundance, one-third of the love triangle +1 feels unsteady and off track."
Read more

"Pale is one of the most explosive characters written for the stage, a sort of latter-day Stanley Kowalski. Driver expertly captures Pale's sudden mood swings and outbursts of temper, his outer bravado and his barely-hidden inner pain...And while there's little question the massively large Driver is physically threatening -- he can easily break anything -- there's the nagging suspicion from the get-go that he's really a gentle giant, which shouldn't really be unveiled until near the play's end."
Read more

“Character-driven play with only a wisp of a plot,…'Burn This' is like a boiler that flares up with a whoosh whenever things begin cooling down, almost always when Driver's on stage…He makes a perfect Beast to Anna's Beauty, even though it's impossible to accept their eventual pairing…Wilson's script makes Anna so placid in the face of Pale's …rudeness that the actress is stymied from the outset; still, one would like to see more signs of her…distaste before she…gets to douse his flames.”
Read more

“There are entertaining moments in ‘Burn This’, especially when Driver takes Lanford’s vivid, wily language and goes to town with it...Russell can’t help but be upstaged by Driver – and by Uranowitz...’Burn This’ might have worked better if the focus were more sharply on the emotional duet, without scenes that now feel extraneous or dated. Perhaps it would have felt breathless at 90 minutes, instead of 150."
Read more

“Set alight by a beautiful, unpredictable performance from Adam Driver, the play is a mishmash of absurdities, contrivances and what-did-he-just-says? But it invites actors to luxuriate in its ripe emotionalisms and half-naked sentimentality. If that’s the kind of thing that turns you on, then sure, sparks fly...Directed with sympathy and a little schlock by Mayer...The romance at the center of 'Burn This' mostly seems like a lot of work and a lot of twaddle."
Read more

"Driver and Russell are like a slow blazing fire. Though they do not combust, there is heat. In their first round, the two smolder and are sexy as hell, but in the second round somehow the chemistry embers are just too lazy to ignite...Russell is beautiful and dancer like. Driver is larger than life, wonderfully quirky and very DeNiro like. Furr has more chemistry with Uranowitz who almost steals the show...Mayer keeps this two hour and twenty minute show on its toes."
Read more

“Mayer directs...and he takes a decidedly light, comic approach to the material, especially the character of Anna...What Russell can’t do is ground Wilson’s play in some reality that makes sense of Anna’s decision...Instead, Russell and Mayer have chosen to make a joke of the whole dated enterprise...Driver gives a towering performance...Pale’s tirades show Wilson in peak form, and Driver does them full justice."
Read more

“For a gay playwright to write a play with gay characters, and never even obliquely mention AIDS is puzzling...Furthermore, the surviving gay roommate, while excellently played...is a tired cliché...Driver is indisputably impressive, but I found his version of Pale unmodulated and too prone to reach for laughs. As Anna, Russell is the one who is pale. In her defense, I think her part is underwritten...If there are hidden depths in the script, director Michael Mayer did not find them."
Read more