Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Burn This (review)

2003; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.2003.0077

1086-332X

Ricardo Montez,

Irish and British Studies

Burn This ends with the play's two main characters, Anna and Pale, holding each other in an embrace full of uncertainty and grief. In the first of the Signature Theatre's productions devoted to Lanford Wilson over the 2002-2003 season, the pair, played by Catherine Keener and Edward Norton, close the play with a look towards an empty bed hovering in a loft above Anna's bedroom. This unoccupied space manages to assert an overwhelming presence throughout the production. Once belonging to Robbie—Anna's friend and Pale's brother—the bed acts as a continual reminder of absence and haunts the interactions that occur within the larger setting of the play. Pale and Anna's developing intimacies do not so much ring as a union of two people hopelessly in love as they do of a kind of grasping to fill a loss that remains wholly unprocessed. The overarching grief of the production is fueled by a stifling wash of silences and denials whose visibility is precipitated in those moments where Anna must confront familial relations from Robbie's past.