The first Burn this reviews are out:
“When Adam Driver barrels onto the stage as the coked-up restaurant manager Pale in Burn This, he doesn’t just give off sparks, he threatens to explode, blowing out the full wall of industrial glass windows in designer Derek McLane’s converted Lower Manhattan warehouse set. It’s no mystery why Keri Russell’s exponentially more composed dancer Anna would be both frightened and mesmerized by the twitchy stranger who has burst in on her, railing about the trials of finding parking on potholed New York City streets, the invasiveness of phone messages, and in one particularly spectacular aria, the meaninglessness of polite interjections like “I’m sorry.” As stage entrances go, it’s a stunner.
In a performance of astonishing physicality that marks an exciting return to the New York stage after a seven–year break, Driver maintains that dangerous energy throughout the production — whether the feral intruder is reeling about the room in a drunken stupor, doubled over with racking sobs of grief or warily surrendering to an emotional involvement he can’t control.
With his rangy frame clad in big-shouldered ‘80s suits and voluminous satiny shirts that indicate more amusing vanity than taste, Pale quite literally fills the stage. Even the heat he gives off is palpable. “I got like a toaster oven I carry around with me in my belly someplace,” he says, and we feel it. Driver has an in-the-moment presence that’s almost scary.” - The Hollywood Reporter
“[…] Driver plays Pale as a man-child with mad mood swings, displaying brilliant flashes of danger, absurdity, anguish and insight. He is coarsely funny in his tirades about Manhattan parking, four-ply toilet paper and clanging heating pipes, yet he is also fastidious, down to the crease and cut of his pants and his ad-hoc tea cozy. He is seemingly homophobic and misogynistic, but also tenderhearted. He’s uber-alpha yet he sobs uncontrollably when emotions get the best of him, which is often.
Vital to the success of this fascinating, flawed (don’t peer too closely at the details) and overlong play is the casting, especially in the leads that require an audience to believe that such disparate people can find a safe haven in each other’s arms.
Driver, a mesmerizing presence in TV’s “Girls” and the latest “Star Wars” trilogy, lives up to expectations of the showcase role originally played by John Malkovich. Driver is riveting here, and audiences will identify with Anna’s dilemma of both wanting him to leave and needing him to stay.” - Variety
“Pale (Adam Driver) makes his entrance crashing and burning. It’s the middle of the night, and he’s never met Anna (Keri Russell) or Larry (Brandon Uranowitz), the erstwhile roommates of his younger brother, who died in an accident the month before. But he barges into their apartment anyhow, without warning, drunk and coked up, wild with half-coherent rage and guilt and grief. (Anna calls him truculent; “like a truck,” explains Larry.) Pale is the kind of steamroller role that is irresistible to actors—a sexy beast whose brutish pride masks a deep well of pain—and Driver gives it everything he’s got. He’s terrific, and slightly terrifying. Even in the vastness of Anna and Larry’s open, spare, high-ceilinged loft, there seems barely enough space to contain him. “ - Time Out
“He [Driver] not only gives a towering performance, he is a tower. If the Ponce Monolith at Tiwanaku ever came to life, it would be Driver’s Pale. This guy’s not just pre-Colombian, he’s downright primordial, and speaks English as if it were a second language coming from a person who never got around to learning a first language. Pale’s tirades show Wilson in peak form, and Driver does them full justice as he races from insult to demand to petty concern and then back to insult and demand and concern about his trousers not being properly pressed.
The question in this very lively parody of “Burn This” is not why Anna ends up with Pale. It’s how she survives sex with Pale.“ - The Wrap
“Driver—a recent Oscar nominee for Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, and a megastar thanks to his role as Kylo Ren, née Ben Solo, in the Star Wars films—has always been a fine stage actor (highlights: 2009’s The Retributionists and 2012’s Look Back in Anger), but he’s a veritable force here. He makes the most of Pale’s cocaine-fueled quirkiness—pulling off his $245 “genuine lizard shoes” that are “fuckin’ killing” his foot, demanding to know why because “you’d think a lizard’s got to be supple, right?”—without taking it over the top.” - New York Stage Review
“Burn This premiered on Broadway in 1987 and won actress Joan Allen a Tony Award. It could do the same for Adam Driver, who provides the flame for a play that, without a star performance, could easily fizzle out. […]
Pale (Driver in a primal, ferocious performance), storms into her apartment one day to pick up his brother’s possessions, she finds herself falling for him against her better judgment as they mourn Robbie’s death together. […]
Fortunately, this production features an explosive performance that heats things up. Driver’s blazing-hot portrayal of the high-strung, coke-snorting Pale ignites the stage like a force of nature. When he enters Anna’s apartment, strafing the room with F-bombs as he rails about the god-awful parking situation in New York and plops his huge lizard-skin shoe on Anna’s red Victorian-style couch to tie the laces, we know we’re dealing with a formidable character (costume designer Clint Ramos decks Driver in fabulous suits that make the tall actor look even more physically imposing).” - Theater mania
“Adam Driver gives a sublimely physical performance in this Broadway revival of Lanford Wilson’s 1987 play. As a piece of writing Burn This is far better at character than it is at plot, but Driver makes it come alive, to the point that Michael Mayer’s bright production dims when he’s not on stage.
In Driver’s hands, Pale is a maelstrom of a man, capable of erupting into violence or desire in an instant. Driver avoids lapsing into class stereotypes as he constructs and deconstructs the character’s masculinity. After Pale shames Larry over his poor tea preparation skills, Driver even manages to turn the act of tea-making into something unexpectedly loving.
Everything he does, be it trying to take off his coat while drunk or getting caught in the sleeve of a kimono, goes towards the shaping of his character. Driver’s Pale can disarm with a grin, giving the audience a peek deep into his heart.” - The Stage
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