Tag Archives: Lanford Wilson

BURN THIS

Adam Driver and Keri Russell star in Broadway revival of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Hudson Theatre
139-141 West 44th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 14, $59 – $315
855-801-5876
www.thehudsonbroadway.com

Adam Driver is scorching hot and Keri Russell sizzles in Michael Mayer’s otherwise surprisingly lukewarm revival of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This, which opened last week at the Hudson Theatre. Oscar and Emmy nominee Driver is deserving of a Tony nod for his ferociously physical, incendiary performance as Pale, a Jersey restaurant manager unable to deal with the tragic death of his younger brother Robbie, a gay dancer who was killed in a boating accident with his lover, Dom. The play is set in 1987 and takes place in a huge industrial loft apartment in Lower Manhattan where Robbie lived with fellow dancer Anna (Russell), a straight woman in a relationship with successful screenwriter Burton (Tony nominee David Furr), and Larry (Tony nominee Brandon Uranowitz), a wisecracking gay man who works in advertising. One night Pale shows up drunk, loudly complaining about New York City, parking, phone messages, new shoes, social politeness, and anything else that comes to mind, rattling on without a filter. He constantly uses words about heat when talking about himself and his life, declaring that his “feet are in boiling water,” he has a toaster oven for a stomach, his normal temperature is about 110, and it’s hot enough in the apartment for them to “bake pizza.” He says he’s “a roving fireman. Very healthy occupation. I’m puttin’ out somebody’s else’s fire. I’m puttin’ out my own. . . . Or sometimes you just let it burn.”

Despite her better judgment, Anna, who is branching out as a choreographer, is strangely attracted to Pale, who is a stark contrast to the more self-contained Burton, who lives in Canada and is always talking about the cold, including snow and “glacier activity”; the only time he brings up heat is when he tells Anna about her upcoming dance, “Make it as personal as you can. Believe me, you can’t imagine a feeling everyone hasn’t had. Make it personal, tell the truth, and then write ‘Burn this’ on it.” Here Wilson is describing his own process in writing the play; it was indeed personal, inspired partly by the death of a friend’s brother, as well as the AIDS epidemic claiming the lives of so many New York artists. He wrote “Burn this” at the top of every page until he realized it should be the title of the play.

Burton (David Furr), Anna (Keri Russell), and Larry (Brandon Uranowitz) have a brief moment to cool down in Burn This at the Hudson Theatre (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Despite the strong cast, led by Lortel Award winner Driver (BlacKkKlansman, Look Back in Anger), whose body commands the stage with an intense, dangerous fury, and Golden Globe winner and Emmy nominee Russell (The Americans, Fat Pig), who has a sweet tenderness as Anna, the play never catches fire. Derek McLane’s set is lovely, with large back windows that look out on the city, an outside world that the characters can’t reach yet, and Clint Ramos’s costumes are sexy and alluring, from Pale’s sharp suits to Anna’s slinky dresses and hapi coat. The unending references to hot and cold, fire and ice grow tiresome, including the leitmotif of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire”; would Larry really sing that? Pulitzer Prize winner Wilson (Talley’s Folly, Angels Fall) and Tony winner Mayer (Spring Awakening, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) also incorporated Springsteen songs into a 1984 revival of 1965’s Balm in Gilead. The play made its Broadway debut in 1987, running for more than a year at the Plymouth Theatre, with John Malkovich as Pale and a Tony-winning Joan Allen as Anna. A 2002 revival at the Signature paired Edward Norton and Catherine Keener. In order for the play to work, it has to have the fire and passion at least reminiscent of A Streetcar Named Desire, but this production, even with its powerful moments and strong performances, too often simmers when it needs to blister and blaze.

THE MOUND BUILDERS

August Howe (David Conrad), his wife, Cynthia (Janie Brookshire), and his sister, D.K. (Danielle Skraastad), can’t separate the past from the present and the future in Signature revival of Lanford Wilson’s THE MOUND BUILDERS (photo by Richard Termine)

The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 14, $75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org

In 1970, Joni Mitchell sang, “Don’t it always seem to go / that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone / They paved paradise / and put up a parking lot.” That essentially sums up Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders, currently being revived at the Signature Theatre. One of Wilson’s personal favorites and winner of the 1975 Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting, The Mound Builders is not an easy play, as evidenced by a Q&A following the April 4 performance, when the dramaturg and members of the cast were barraged with questions from the audience about what they all just saw, what it meant, and why the first act “meandered, meandered, and meandered.” But the players handled it all in stride, as they do the show itself. The Mound Builders takes place in February 1975 in Blue Shoals, Illinois, where Professor August Howe (David Conrad) and his right-hand man, Dr. Dan Loggins (Zachary Booth), are leading an archaeological dig after the discovery of a pre-Columbian civilization that surfaced as construction crews came in to build a new hotel and resort center. The story is actually told in a series of flashbacks, as Howe dictates a slideshow onto a tape recorder for his assistant, the scenes unfolding after he introduces them for the unseen “Diane.” Howe and his wife, Cynthia (Janie Brookshire), who has taken all the photos, are staying with their young daughter, Kirsten (Rachel Resheff), in a home owned by Chad Jasker (Will Rogers) and his family, who are in line to make quite a windfall from the new development. Also in the house are Dan’s pregnant gynecologist wife, Dr. Jean Loggins (Lisa Joyce), and novelist D. K. “Delia” Eriksen (Danielle Skraastad), August’s deeply troubled sister who has recently been released from an institution. As August and Dan continue to uncover remarkable artifacts of the past, they fail to connect with the present, as the jittery Chad makes moves on Cynthia, Jean, and a clueless Dan, and a thunderous rainstorm threatens to flood the area.

Dan (Zachary Booth) and Chad (Will Rogers) toast to very different futures in THE MOUND BUILDERS (photo by Richard Termine)

Part of the Signature’s Legacy Program honoring the tenth anniversary of Wilson’s 2002-3 tenure as playwright in residence, The Mound Builders takes a while to get going, but once it does, it becomes a compelling character study that explores people’s needs and desires, from love, money, and sex to fame, family, and just plain acknowledgment. The ricketiness of set designer Neil Patel’s somewhat ramshackle wooden-slatted house corresponds well with the fragility of the characters’ relationships with one another, as secrets rise to the surface like the ancient objects August and Dan are obsessed with finding. Director Jo Bonney jumps up the action in the second act, in which the house is curiously askew from its previous position, foreshadowing what is to come between the characters. Although Wilson’s legacy — the Missouri-born playwright passed away in 2011 at the age of seventy-three — is being better served right now by the Roundabout’s wonderful revival of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley’s Folly at the Laura Pels, The Mound Builders is still a more-than-able production of a complicated play. By the end, the characters indeed don’t know what they’ve got till it’s gone, each of their individual paradises paved over, lost forever.

TALLEY’S FOLLY

Matt Friedman (Danny Burstein) pleads his case to Sally Talley (Sarah Paulson) in new production of TALLEY’S FOLLY (photo by Joan Marcus)

Roundabout at Laura Pels Theatre
Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
111 West 46th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 12, $91
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Danny Burstein gives one of the best performances of the season in the first-ever New York revival of Lanford Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Talley’s Folly. Burstein (Company, Golden Boy) stars as Matt Friedman, a Jewish accountant from St. Louis who has come to Lebanon, Missouri (Wilson’s hometown), in 1944 to declare his love for southern belle Sally Talley (Sarah Paulson), with whom he had a brief flirtation the previous summer. As the show starts, Friedman bursts down the aisle and onto the stage, directly addressing the audience. “If everything goes well for me tonight,” he says in a Jewish accent, “this should be a waltz, one-two-three, one-two-three; a no-holds-barred romantic story, and since I’m not a romantic type, I’m going to need the whole valentine here to help me: the woods, the willows, the vines, the moonlight, the band — there’s a band that plays tonight, over in the park. The trees, the berries, the breeze, the sounds: water and crickets, frogs, dogs, the light, the bees, working all night.” The crowd instantly on his side — he even promises that it will all take place within a brisk ninety-seven minutes — Matt is soon joined by Sally, a nurse’s aide who is helping take care of wounded soldiers at a local hospital. More than a decade younger than Matt, Sally is not thrilled to see him, begging him to leave before her anti-Semitic Ozark family does something bad to him, but Matt is not about to take off without speaking his mind — and trying to convince Sally that she feels the same way he does, which clearly won’t be easy. “You do not have the perception God gave lettuce,” she tells him. “I did not answer but one letter and in that one short note I tried to say in no uncertain terms that I didn’t want you to write to me. You have sent me an almost daily chronicle of your life in your office. The most mundane details of your accounting life. Why did you come back here?”

Matt experiences a bump in the road while wooing Sally in Roundabout revival (photo by Joan Marcus)

As he continues to woo Sally despite her protestations, Matt makes full use of designer Jeff Cowie’s dilapidated Victorian boathouse set, which has a nostalgic charm to it while also representing the changing of the Old South and the new America that will arise out of World War II. Little by little, the repressed Sally begins to open up and the captivating waltz grows ever-more complex, one-two-three, one-two-three, as it heads to its beautiful conclusion, exactly ninety-seven minutes after it started. Director Michael Wilson (Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, Enchanted April) keeps things moving at an engaging pace, with just the right balance of humor, warmth, and conflict, bringing a vibrancy and freshness to the thirty-three-year-old play, the middle part of a trilogy that began with Talley & Son and concludes with Fifth of July. Paulson (American Horror Story, Collected Stories) is excellent as Burstein’s shiksa dance partner, standing appropriately stiff and tall in her yellow dress and blonde hair, the prim-and-proper polar opposite of the dark-suited, thickly bearded, no-holds-barred Burstein, the two claiming as their own roles originated by Trish Hawkins and Judd Hirsch. This Roundabout Theatre production, immersed in a sweet, contagious innocence, is a fitting tribute to Wilson, who passed away in 2011 at the age of seventy-four, leaving behind a legacy that also includes The Hot l Baltimore and Burn This. (Wilson’s 1975 play, The Mound Builders, is currently being revived at the Signature Theatre, where it has been extended through April 14.)