The Dream of the Burning Boy

The Roundabout Underground program has served me well in the past. They put on full productions of new plays by new artists in a tiny black box theater in the subbasement of their home base in midtown The Dream of the Burning Boy is the fifth production in the space. It follows the deliriously funny Speech and Debate, the messy but moving The Language of Trees, the half great/half appalling musical Ordinary Days, and the stellar comedy Tigers Be Still.

Burning Boy is, curiously, the third of the plays set in a high school (I know they focus on young writers, but how limited are the worldviews we’re talking about?). This time around, we have a possibly misanthropic English teacher who was the last person to see a student before the kid dropped dead of a brain aneurysm. Other characters are the overly friendly guidance counselor, the dead kid’s girlfriend who may have been cheating on him, the kid’s steely but depressed mom, the sister who always felt second best and is now the survivor, and a small handful of other stock characters plucked right out of every other play/movie/novel about grief ever, thrown onstage and forced to perform through 90 minutes of plot shenanigans that are more contrived than a Shakespearean play about lost twins and folks hiding out in drag. Unlike one of Shakespeare’s more absurd plays, the proceedings are less than lyrical, lack any keen insight on humanity, and seem to be filtered through the collected works of Oprah Winfrey.

It’s one thing to watch unknowns flounder in a play like this. It’s another to watch a great actor like Reed Birney adrift in a sea of clichés and coincidences. He delivers, unsurprisingly, a very strong performance. So does Matt Dellapina as the dopey and endearing (and crazy adorable, though this is unrelated to his actual performance) guidance counselor with a heart of gold. Sure, he’s playing a stereotype. But he’s doing it with panache! The other performers are less fantastic, but to be fair, they aren’t given a ton to work with.

You know things are bad when you check your watch more than once during a play that’s only 90 minutes long. You know they’re worse when you start noticing how low the ceiling of the theater is and wondering how you got through four other performances there without feeling claustrophobic.

I know I’ve been full negative Nancy for the past few shows I’ve seen, but I’m a show ahead of what I’ve written about, so know this: my next post is going to be super positive! After two weeks of not really liking anything, last night was a blast of fresh air. More on it coming soon…