Burning

I've had my eye on when I'd hit 100 posts because then I'd have seen my 100 shows, but now that I'm at post 98, I realize that I did skip writing about that one concert way back when and also did one post about two shows a few months ago. Which means that my 100th show of the year was The New Group's production of Burning at the Acorn Theater in Theater Row. The same space I saw my first show of the year in when I started the blog. OMG FULL CIRCLE.

So yeah, that might seem like kismet except...Burning. Umm...what to say?

Let's start here: at intermission, I had the following conversation:
Friend: "We're leaving...right?"
Me: "I know it's fucking weird, but I maintain that this COULD end up being brilliant."
Friend: "..."
Me: "No, I mean, it's experimental and interesting and going fascinating places, and we should keep an open mind and hey, I haven't been bored at all, so...yeah, it's super weird, but can you honestly say you have any idea what's going to happen next? Doesn't the fact that anything can happen make you at least curious enough to stay?"
Friend: "I bet the neo-Nazi fucks his sister."

Spoiler alert: act 2 opens with the neo-Nazi fingering his sister. FINE, friend. You were right. Whatever. I still wasn't bored.

Let's just try to do a reallllllly quick plot overview, mm-kay? Brace yourselves. So this 14-year-old wants to go to acting school but his mother dies of an overdose. He heads across the country to interview anyway and convinces an older gay couple to take him in, let him into the school, and have sex with him. Meanwhile, German neo-Nazi's sister is paralyzed as a result of a car accident that also killed their parents. Back in America, a black artist is preparing for an exhibition in Germany when his cousin dies of an overdose. Cousin's son wants him to pay for the funeral but blah blah class issues blah.

So we cover neo-Nazi's, race relations, pedophilia, AIDS, drugs, incest, and a whole bunch of other stuff over three hours as the storylines eventually work their ways together. It's about 14 times too absurd to take seriously as a drama, 5 times too facile to really work as a satire, and half as funny as it needs to be in order to be a comedy. So instead it's just a mess. A big, flailing, did-no-one-EVER-suggest-any-cuts mess.

Out of the 15 person cast, I'd guess maybe three of them kept their clothes on, so if you see the show you can take bets on who'll disrobe next. The nudity, like everything in the show, feels extraneous at best, seemingly there to shock or titillate but falling flat. The worst part is that pieces of the show feel like they could have had an impact. And other parts might legitimately challenge the viewer. But it's all so muddled that the only logical response is to sit back and think, "Really?" It's like every cultural fear of 1996 got together and decided to have an orgy.

Which is not to say I didn't find any moments affecting and other parts very funny. The line "I was in a vagina for a moment" was a stand-out in a too-offensive to actually be offensive monologue about a hermaphrodite rapist (I'm still not making any of this up).

It's telling that in a show that I THINK is aiming to be unnerving and funny, the only time I actually laughed in discomfort was in a quieter scene as two actors whispered to each other when an old man a few rows behind me (oh yeah--I should mention I was in the front row) suddenly screamed, "LOUDER!"

Any time I see something new that I think is crazy dumb I worry that somewhere down the line, that play will become a classic that no one understood when it was first performed. That I'll be the idiot decrying Genet or walking out on Chekhov. But in the case of Burning, I'm pretty secure saying no, it was actually just fucking stupid.