Watchable but not especially rewarding revival of Lanford Wilson's tale of a grieving woman finding solace in hot nookie with a vaguely dangerous asshole. I was lucky enough to see the original production, with John Malkovich torching the stage indelibly, albeit to the detriment of the love story's credibility—i.e., what did Joan Allen's Anna see in him? With Edward Norton's funnier, greasier turn, Pale's tantrums are more childlike and less overtly threatening, though there's still an oil-and-vinaigrette taste to their twosome. Catherine Keener's general clumpiness and flat stage voice aside, the real problem is the play. At three hours, Burn This yearns to be an epic meditation on how sex and creativity can assuage grief, but at heart it's a soap-operatic potboiler (note how the audience comes alive only at the macho man fight in the second act). The whole Pale-Anna-Burton triangle (with a gay roommate adding a fourth corner) just doesn't connect to the love-and-loss themes in any meaningful way. And if Wilson meant Anna's choice to trade a nice boyfriend for cautiously dangerous sex to be an AIDS metaphor, that just doesn't come through now the way it might have in 1987.
