Adam Driver and Keri Russell Attack Spar Wars – Deadline

Can a game wait? Let's say he can do it so that we can say that this is the case: Burn this has been hiding since 1987 in anticipation of the arrival of Adam Driver, and just for this meeting, the years have not been lost.

But this game alone is pretty much all we have in Michael Mayer's wake up on Broadway tonight at the Hudson Theater. And it's quite strange, because the other game of production – Driver and his colleagues Star Wars: Episode IX fellow Keri Russell – is the main selling point here, a team that burns the subway walls since hot ads started appearing earlier this winter.

Say that Burn this It has not been particularly well aged since 1987. It is a bit like showing an unbalanced old house with poorly constructed foundations that needed painting – perhaps quite true, but almost out of the way. Burn this"The flaws existed from the beginning – it's a play about AIDS that does not mention AIDS and a love story that requires that we take the word for word – but that allows the actors to do a great acting act, well, that's it. Or should.

To reach the unfortunate point: Russell, so good in Americans, is just no match for the pilot or the stage. His performance here is flat, his delivery only note. Her Anna is not only eclipsed by Pale, larger than life, Driver, but also by his boyfriend in plush shirt, whose goal, drawn from decades of theatrical conventions, is to project almost no shadow.

And do not be fooled: Burn this nothing is otherwise conventional. Remove obscenities and epithets – shocking again, but for reasons totally different from those of 1987 – and the story is not breathtaking Neil Simon or Philip Barry: a woman emotionally closed to his complacency (and his complacent relationship with this plush shirt) upset by the arrival of a funky and unrepentant great card from a man who would have been Cary Grant or Richard Dreyfus at another time. There is even a best gay friend who plays the role of wise (and, as played here by Brandon Uranowitz, does very, very well).

Located at the height of the devastation of AIDS (and in the middle, it was devastating, without ever making the slightest hint), Burn this Begins right after the funeral of Robbie, a young gay dancer whose death in a boating accident crushed Anna (Russell), Robbie's roommate, best friend and dance collaborator. Anna has just returned from her utterly depressing funeral in New Jersey, where her (perhaps) distraught and helpless family supposed that she was his girlfriend.

David Furr, Keri Russell and Brandon Uranowitz

Back at the Lower Manhattan mansard studio (perfectly rendered in the industrial style of the 80's with second-hand furniture by Derek McLane) that she shares with Larry (Uranowitz), a frustrated publicity writer, and that's the only way to get the job done. they both shared with Robbie, Anna is comforted. a bit, by his comfortable buddy Burton (David Furr, excellent), a beautiful and rich sci-fi writer (from birth) who makes him few demands and fits well into the love triumvirate.

Enter Pale (Driver), Robbie's brash, brutal and brutal older brother, who came from Jersey to retrieve business and, most of the time, try to make sense of his brother's or sister's world. Despite Anna's previous assumption, Pale was well aware of Robbie's sexuality and he was not very happy about it – he discussed Anna's way of life with, as he says, "the two bundles" about the same time he throws the word "order" at him.

In one of the grand entrances of the time that catches the attention and announces the actors, Pale enters the loft, dressed in a shiny suit and boots lizard, and lets slip this soliloquy breathtaking:

Damn that fucking place, how can we live in this shitty city? I do not do it, I do not drive my car in this fucking sewer every time. Who are these assholes? A son of a bitch with greasy eyes and fat lips thinks he owns the space of this animal. The city has this space specially reserved for its private use. Twenty-five minutes more, I drive in this street of garbage. I'm heading to this space, I'm looking back, this shit shit green shit trans am on my ass that will beep-beep. I'm going out, this salesman says it's my space. I showed him the f * ckin 'tire changer; I said to the seller, you want this space, you'll wake up tomorrow, find you slept in your car. This is not your space, you cherish your retractable lights. Ho-Jo. Am I right? This shit? We do not talk about shitting like that.

The pilot delivers the four-letter speech as a tune, beautifully. Later, there are other insults and insults more ugly, although neither Anna nor Larry seem too offended, certainly not by today's standards. Hearing members of the audience thinking that roommates should call the police and fire the impotent drunken bigot may make us think of snowflakes, as if we simply could not grasp the politically incorrect passion of those days. difficult. When the Pale Blower gives Burton a punch, well, he does not hit Anna, does he? Count for something, right?

Or does it? Anna and Pale are falling to bed so quickly – grief shared, ok, and yearning for two Tennessee Williams horndogs – that we know that they are made for each other, souls destined to break free from the inhibition and to collide, then sound you, until the girl goodbye says to stay.

But it's here that Wilson's 1980s play did not get any better than Donna Summer's. Driver, or rather pale, or not Driver, is just as sexy as everyone who comes out, but showing affection to a girl by patting her boyfriend and repeatedly calling her beloved friend as a fruit just does not seem as charming as it is. 39; before. fill a room with fright and fear does not just scream a carefree joie de vivre like he might have done in the pre-too-early era. Aziz Ansari almost destroyed his career for much less.

So what does it take? I would say passion, or at least chemistry. But Anna just does not have the emotional weight to provide the weight needed for an equal and opposite reaction to Driver's Pale. She does not seem more attracted to Pale than she was to Burton. Better, she had stayed with this rich, handsome, steep steep. They would have had a nice little life.