Theatre in Review: Burning (The New Group/Theatre Row)

	Stephen Tyrone Henderson and Vladimir Versailles. Photo: Monique Carboni

You can't say that Thomas Bradshaw isn't generous. In Burning, he gives the audience several diverse groups of characters, three sets of orphans with complicated back stories, two separate time frames decades apart, any number of onstage couplings, and a panoply of issues, including racial and sexual identity, fascism, pedophilia, incest, philosophy, religion, the meaning of family, and God only knows what else. If he could whip all these up into a coherent artistic statement, you could start engraving the prizes now. Instead, Burning is a kind of fabulous, ambitious mess, a pileup of people, ideas, revelations, and moods. It's never dull, but its main fascination lies in trying to figure out where this bizarre, out-of-control vehicle could possibly be headed.

It begins in 1983, with Chris, a troubled San Francisco teenager-- his mother is a drug addict and, at 14, he is already working as a hustler-- on the phone, having a strangely intimate conversation with Jack, a Broadway leading man and administrator at New York's Performing Arts High School. After his mother's death, by overdose, Chris hops a bus for New York and gives a truly terrible audition, but Jack and his partner, Simon, a Broadway producer, take pity on the young man and informally adopt him.

It's not long before Chris is taking part in threesomes with "Dad" and "Uncle Jack," and, gotten up in a white coat and bow tie, is serving cocktails to their guests, while gulping down tumblers of vodka in their presence. He gets hired as the world's youngest assistant director, on Simon's latest Broadway production. Soon after, Chris and Donald, the playwright, are lying around in their underwear, reading from the Marquis de Sade. Chris is a most erudite 14-year-old: "He's saying that good and evil are social constructs, and that there's no such thing as wrong and right. Just choices that we make based on our own internal compass." This comment is followed by a bout of anal sex, a bitter confrontation with Jack and Simon, a diagnosis of HIV, and flight to Europe.

As you can probably guess by now, we're not exactly in the world of kitchen-sink realism. The play Simon is producing focuses on a bunch of American businessmen on a sex-tourism junket to Thailand. In one of Burning's most risible scenes, Simon tells Donald his work needs to be trimmed to one character and given an uplifting ending. "You see," he says, "Reagan's budget cuts have really affected arts funding, and paying four extra actors for eight shows a week gets very expensive." Later, when the production falls through, Simon, in a fit of pique, says to Noah, the director, "We have a Broadway theatre rented. If there's a play that you feel is production ready, let's produce it!" Noah replies, "I'll go home and look through my pile of scripts."

Burning is the second play I've seen in two weeks -- the other is The Atmosphere of Memory -- written by someone who seems not to have the faintest notion about the realities of commercial theatre. Does Bradshaw really think that Broadway shows were, or are, funded by the NEA? That if a production falls apart in rehearsals, the producer simply swaps out one script for another? That teenagers apply to PA High School by having late-night conversations with dirty old men? The characters' idle chitchat about '80s-era Broadway is borderline embarrassing: Chris, announcing that he has penned a drama about a male hustler, asks, "Do you think Neil Simon would like my play?"

Of course, these scenes only make up one-third of Burning. What do they have to do with Peter, a black artist, living in 2011, who disguises his racial identity while selling canvases depicting ghetto drug dealers and whores? Or with Franklin, his recently orphaned cousin from the projects? Or with Michael, a Berlin-based neo-Nazi, who admires Peter's work, and Katrin, his wheelchair-bound sister? Or with the adult Chris, who, decades later, is still trying to get Donald's sex-tourism play produced?

All of these elements ultimately do converge, but the action is dogged by the author's comic-book sensibility. Peter, who has never slept with a woman of his own race, falls hard for Greta, a black prostitute, in the time it takes to utter four lines of dialogue. Previously the most buttoned-up character on stage, he immediately begins making plans to bring her to America -- despite the white wife he has living there -- then engages her in role-playing that allows him to act out the sexual trauma, with a female cousin, that apparently shaped his life. Franklin, picked up by the adult Chris, reveals that, at 19, he has had only one experience in the bedroom -- bad luck that the girl, his high school crush, turned out to be a hermaphrodite with a taste for bondage. Chris' response: "I want to help you discover your sexuality."

In addition to all this, the action is loaded with scenes that could profitably be cut with no impact on the play whatsoever. They include the discussion, between Michael, Katrin, and Heinz, about the importance of fiber to their bowel movements; a bathtub encounter between Michael and Katrin, in which he manually stimulates her to orgasm; and Chris' appearance at the memorial service for one of his fathers, which he uses as an audition opportunity, complete with pictures and resumes.

About half the time, it's not hard to feel that Bradshaw is kidding; at other times, he appears to be deadly earnest. What seems obvious is that he has spent an enormous amount of time moving figures across his broad canvas, but has spent little or no time on giving them any kind of recognizable humanity. We are asked to believe that the teenage Chris sells his body, sleeps with his adoptive fathers, falls in love overnight, and nurses his lover to his death -- all before the age of 17, with no psychological repercussions whatsoever. (On the other hand, Peter, the play's heterosexual character, sleeps with Greta on a whim -- a choice that leads to madness and death.) Burning wanders all over the map, often earning shocked laughter from an audience that seemingly can't tell if the playwright is in on the joke. It takes Josephine, Peter's understandably nonplussed wife, to sum things up: "Sometimes our worst fears come true. Life is all surprises, really. Sometimes things are better than you expect, and sometimes they're much worse."

The large cast, featuring Hunter Foster as the adult Chris, struggles with the unbelievable things each of them is given to say and do. The best work comes from Evan Johnson, who gives the young Chris a convincing gee-whiz quality in the middle of the most outrageous situations; Barrett Doss, as Greta, who, in one of Bradshaw's better scenes, shows remarkable skill at shaking down a customer's wife; and Vladimir Versailles, whose sexually confused Franklin is thoroughly different from his harrowing turn earlier in the season as Abner Louima in The Wood. If the director, Scott Elliott, can't knit together this mishmash of ideas and tones, well, who could?

The action unfolds on Derek McLane's unit set, which contains several arrangements of furniture that are useful in multiple scenes and locations. The action is backed by a drapery that, unfortunately, proves to be a hostile surface for Wendall K. Harrington's projections, most of which are impossible to make out, even given the delicacy of Peter Kaczorowski's lighting. Clint Ramos' costumes and Bart Fasbender's sound design (making use of numbers from Pippin and several covers of Elton John and Bernie Taupin's "Your Song") are perfectly okay.

Burning is the third play I've seen at New Group in as many seasons that has needed ruthless cutting and shaping. (The others were The Starry Messenger and Blood From a Stone.) Unless this is some form of shock therapy, the company isn't really helping these writers -- all of whom are talented -- by producing such overwritten scripts. This one needed a lot more time in the workshop.--David Barbour