The weather Friday night was indeed frightful, bullying theatergoers into staying home. Those of us who had no choice, though, found the fire inside Gremlin Theatre wickedly delightful. The St. Paul playhouse opened Lanford Wilson's "Burn This," a late-1980s scorcher stoked with sex, grief and laughter. Seriously, what else is there in life?
This is not Wilson's strongest play in terms of his commentary on modernity. Conflicting worlds of a very specific sort do collide,and the resulting explosion is mostly spectacle. But what an enjoyable spectacle. Wilson makes up for his undernourished philosophy with well-described characters who carve up meaty slabs of text like a steak knife. As is the case with an opera singer, the central character, Pale (Peter Christian Hansen), rails about downtown New York with an elevated sense of performance in which what he says is less important than how he says it. Dialogue is a prop, a gesture, a means of illustrating character.
Pale has stumbled into this downtown world (represented well by Carl Schoenborn's spare brick loft), to pick up the effects of his deceased brother, Robbie. A whirlwind of profane ignorance, Pale confronts Robbie's roommate and dance partner, Anna (Katie Guentzel), who is heartbroken and angry over Robbie's death. Now when a drunken, abusive Jersey goomba scares the hell out of you at 5 in the morning, obviously, you're going to fall in love with him.
This knocks Anna's relationship with her secure boyfriend, Burton (Adam Whisner), off its moorings, sending her into a spiral of agony that she channels into her art. She choreographs a new work based on her attraction for Pale. The fourth character in this mix is Anna's roommate, Larry (Wade Vaughn), a gay advertising director who skillfully navigates the emotions of the other three.
Gremlin's production reminds us of how much fun intimate theater can be. Ellen Fenster directs with an appetite for the intense dance -- balancing Pale's thuggery with Larry's wit, Burton's earnest goodness and Anna's disquiet. While things are occasionally overwrought, this seems more Wilson's fault than the actors.
Hansen throbs with Pale's bravado, self-hatred and grudging tenderness. The role requires a visceral understanding of machismo, and Hansen gets that.
Vaughn plays Larry without a hint of bitchiness. He's droll, self-deprecating and ultimately full of human compassion. Whisner is absolutely natural in portraying Burton's comfortability and decency. Guentzel's Anna gets on the high wire of anxiety perhaps a little too evidently, but she's playing a dancer/choreographer -- someone accustomed to palpable emotions.
Also worth note are Katharine Horowitz's ambient sound and musical interludes. As a counterpoint to the Christmas treacle out there (good treacle but still treacle), "Burn This" is great stuff, and it demonstrates again how vital Gremlin is to the theater scene.
