Burn This
by Lanford Wilson

Name: Burn This
Brand: Lanford Wilson
SKU: 9780822216254
Rating: 3.91 (1629 reviews)

Broadway Off-Broadway West End

Highlights

Small Cast

Female

Male

120 mins Present Day Interior Set Contemporary Costumes/Street Clothes American

Awards & Recognition

Drama Desk Award Obie Award Tony Award

Winner! 1987 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play Winner! 2003 Obie Award for Performance Nominee: Two 1987 Drama Desk Awards Nominee: Three 2019 Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Play

Synopsis

Commissioned by the Circle Repertory Company, Burn This first appeared at the Mark Taper Forum in Los angeles in 1987 to near-universal praise.

Set in the bohemian art world of downtown New York, this vivid and challenging drama explores the spiritual and emotional isolation of Anna and Pale, two outcasts who meet in the wake of the accidental death by drowning of a mutual friend.

Their determined struggle toward emotional honesty and liberation--by no means guaranteed at the play's ambiguous end--exemplifies the strength, humor, and complexity of all of Lanford Wilson's work and confirms his standing as one of America's greatest living playwrights.

Lanford Wilson was born in Lebanon, Missouri, in 1938 and attended the University of Chicago.

A founding member of the Circle Repertory Company in New York, he has seen many of his plays produced in theaters all over the United States and abroad.

He is the recipient of many awards, including a Drama Desk Vernon Rice Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and two Obies.

Press Reviews

"Quite simply, Lanford Wilson’s Burn This is superb writing transformed into brilliant theatre."
— Drama-Logue

"Broadway has finally gotten masterfully into its stride with a new American play – Burn This."
— New York Post

"John Malkovich’s [Pale’s] entrance in Lanford Wilson’s Burn This is probably the most sensational since the young Brando’s in A Streetcar Named Desire."
— Newsweek