Burning

I know that walking out on a show should probably disqualify me from reviewing it, so I will only comment on what I saw of Burning. To be completely transparent, I’ve walked out on a number of shows in my time. I figure I don’t have enough life left to spend it being miserable or bored (as Ouiser says in Steel Magnolias, "I can nap at home for free.") Yes, I know that some shows get better in the second act or come together in unexpected ways and that occasionally the sum is greater, blah, blah, blah.

I dashed at the first blackout of the Natasha Richardson revival of Streetcar. With all due respect to her memory, and I have been thrilled by her work before, I hated her performance so immediately in Streetcar that it was unbearable (John C Reilly was almost equally tortuous). I walked out on The Blonde in the Thunderbird just after Suzanne Somers ducked behind a set cube, baby-talk singing “If I only had a bwain.” I thought it best to leave before I started to sympathize with her drunken, abusive father. I so violently hated Kate Burton in Hedda Gabler that I told friends I had wanted to rush the stage and stab her in the face with a fork. I didn’t and wouldn’t. I’m not really the cutlery-wielding sort. But it accurately characterized why I removed myself from reach of stage or silver at intermission. The earliest I have ever left a play is prior to the start of Grasses of a Thousand Colors by Wallace Shawn. I had been mislead about what I was seeing by the friend I was joining and, upon arrival, was pointed to a seat in the middle of a long row—far from an aisle or an escape route. According to the usher, the intermission was also not near. I hedged my bets and was told by the friend afterward that I had made the right decision. I didn’t wait for S. Epatha Merkerson to get Little Sheba back, didn’t wait for the latest revival of Three Penny Opera to make sense, and I split before they divided Horton Foote’s estate. I don’t regret a single departure, those listed or countless others.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the theatre. There is nothing more magical on earth than being part of a theatrical moment that will never exist exactly the same way again. I love witnessing talent. I just have no patience for crap.

To say that Burning (produced by The New Group at The Acorn) was crap would be an insult to the fine performances of colons everywhere. It is one of those shows that I could imagine coming together in the second act. I just didn’t care to be there when it did. The playwright opens the play with a discussion about honesty, specifically honesty in the theatre, then proceeds to offer a parade of characters and situations that are trite, dishonest, and poorly played. He offers up heavy material, weighty subjects: drug overdoses, racism, child exploitation, paraplegic Neo-Nazis, welfare, nudity, simulated sex, and general creepiness. It’s all in there but the assassination of JFK, and that could have made the second act.

The play worked awfully hard to be shocking, and I certainly had the front row seat for it. I got an eye full of shaved vagina and some interracial, simulated hetero sex. I was mere feet (and a very few inches) from a naked penis and some simulated man-on-man, anal sex that segued into simulated oral sex with a 14 year old (played by an actor as far from 14 as I am from ever catching the second act.) There was some child prostitution, a brother painting his topless sister, and a sprinkling of the N-word. Endless skin and skin heads. Mmm, edgy.

You’d think with all that there might be something compelling, perhaps a point even. I suppose the juxtaposition of a theatrical producer wanting to sugar coat the story of a six year old sex slave and paint it as a portrait of the American dream then enslaving a child both functionally and emotionally in his own home with no self awareness whatsoever makes a point. I suppose the tribulations of a black painter hiding his identity to avoid the social politics of race could make a fine point too—although the fact that his subject matter is exclusively racial left me with the suspicion of disbelief. Even the characterization that Nazis have feelings (and constipation) too makes a point. What these points didn't do was point the play in an interesting direction.

The directing and set design were solid. The acting ran the gamut from mediocre to maxiocre. The German accents ran the gamut from schlect to scheisse. But it is playwright Thomas Bradshaw, the “downtown phenomenon and Guggenheim Award-winner,” according to the website, who deserves the credit for this slow burn that never caught fire in the first act. The only thing burning was my desire to leave.