About the Play:

Burn This has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, and Female/Male Scenes.

Burn This is a full-length comedic drama by Lanford Wilson. What happens after the tragic death of a talented dancer and brother? A dangerously sensual restaurant owner and a female modern dancer face their shared loss and collide impossibly into a doomed affair. Burn This is an emotionally and sexually charged play that probes deeply and with great dramatic and comic effect into the lives of its singular characters. 

Burn This is about a romance that develops after a tragic death. The place is a Manhattan loft shared by Anna, a lithe young dancer-choreographer, and her two gay roommates – her collaborator, Robby, who has just been killed in a freak boating accident, and Larry, a world-weary, caustically funny young advertising executive. As the play begins Anna is recovering from attending Robby's funeral, comforted by her wealthy, well-meaning boyfriend, Burton, a sci-fi screenwriter whose persistent proposals of marriage Anna finds herself unable to accept. Then, with sudden, unexpected explosiveness, Robby's older brother, a volatile New York restaurateur called Pale, bursts on the scene. He has come to collect his brother's belongings – but stays on to transform the action of the play and the lives of those in it. Menacing, profane, dangerous and yet oddly sensitive, Pale is both terrifying and fascinating and, in the end, the one who brings to Anna the unsettling but compelling love that, despite her fears and doubts, she cannot turn away.

Burn This premiered in 1987 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles to near-universal praise. Later that same year it transferred to off-Broadway's Theatre 890 and then to Broadway's Plymouth Theatre, both to critical and popular acclaim. Since then the play travelled to the Hampstead Theatre in 1990 where it transferred successfully to London's West End at the Lyric Theatre, was revived off Broadway in 2002, and on Broadway in 2019. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 1 female, 3 male

What people say:

"From his earliest plays to his last, Burn This, Lanford Wilson has been firmly committed to the free expression of the individual spirit, no matter how nonconformist or even prodigal that spirit may seem to be … In the sense that it deals with lonely and displaced characters, Burn This is in the Wilson tradition. Where it breaks dramatic ground for the author is in its passion...Mr. Wilson exposes deep uncauterized emotional wounds – and offers no salve." — New York Times

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

"Burn This is Lanford Wilson's masterpiece." — Los Angeles Herald Examiner

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

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

About the Playwright:

Lanford Wilson (1937-2011) was one of the most distinguished American playwrights of the late 20th century. He was instrumental in drawing attention to Off-Off Broadway, where his first works were staged in the mid-1960s. He was also among the first playwrights to move from that milieu to renown on wider stages, ascending to off Broadway, and then to Broadway, within a decade of his arrival in New York. His work has also long been a staple of regional theaters throughout the United States. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame, and in 2004 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.