2 Burn

I always get excited about the NY International Fringe Festival. That excitement usually lasts until I've seen my first Fringe show of the year. Case in point: 2 Burn.

2 Burn? Not 2 burn.

Here's the concept behind the show: someone has an academic interest in idioms about romance that are rooted in disease and how they crop up in pop culture (think "Fever" or Madonna's "Burning Up"). So a teenage student flunking poetry at nameless conservative university actively pursues an out gay professor writing a book about the whole love/disease thing. I would try to explain why he does this, but, well...I'm not sure there's any real reason other than the fact that without this relationship, there would be no play.

Meanwhile, the professor's lesbian best friend is trying to get him back together with his ex-boyfriend. She also happens to be the kid's poetry professor who happens to be flunking him because the kid has all these ideas that feelings are just a social construct. Ideas he got from the main character's book.

Blah, blah, blah...coincidence adds to coincidence adds to lengthy diatribes about BIG IDEAS leading to an ending that would probably be pretty great if it had been tacked onto a play that actually deserved it.

I think the most frustrating thing here is that the playwright seems to have some interesting thoughts. Just enough to really drive home how thin the play is and how didactically it's constructed. It's like watching someone sketch the rough idea for something that they can develop later. As a first draft, I'd say there might be enough there conceptually to take the time to overhaul. As it stands, though, it shouldn't be in front of an audience.

Suffice to say, the most dramatic thing I saw at the theater that night was someone who identified herself as a friend of the playwright freaking the fuck out on the hapless person running the door. Apparently they couldn't find a record of her tickets being purchased, so she opted to crank the dial to mega-bitch.

The two female cast members, Deena Jiles and Michelle Wood, delivered with full conviction and were deeply admirable, especially considering it was the first performance for an audience. But even the strongest performances couldn't fill the cavernous holes in the play.