Fire and art Michael T. Weiss sparks Burn This BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Burn This By Lanford Wilson. Directed by Susan Fenichell. Set by James Noone. Costumes by Candice Donnelly. Lighting by Mary Louise Geiger. Sound by Drew Levy. With Anne Torsiglieri, Brian Hutchison, Nat DeWolf, and Michael T. Weiss. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through December 12.

In 1987, the subtext for Burn This was the AIDS crisis; now it’s September 11. Pulitzer Prize winner Lanford Wilson’s play is about the passionate collision of mourning, creativity, and sex, its unlikely if desperately charged lovers coming together after the sudden death of a promising dancer who was the terpsichorean partner and inspiration of choreographer Anna and the younger brother of coked-up lit-match-of-a-restaurant-manager Pale.

The play, an artfully constructed dance itself, would be more buyable if it remained a smart, tender Manhattan parable about how acknowledging our most primitive feelings, including grief and sex, can burst artistic floodgates. Instead, it turns sentimental toward the end, its mismatched lovers weeping into each other’s hair and appearing about to pick out china together. But at its best, the overlong work offers both wit and sizzle. And at the Huntington Theatre Company, it’s built on a fire-licked performance by Michael T. Weiss, who as Pale injects a heavy dose of Al Pacino into the showy role originally essayed on Broadway by John Malkovich. A 2002 Signature Theatre Company revival that featured Edward Norton and Catherine Keener among its quartet of actors is said to have gone for soul and a more balanced ensemble. The Huntington staging, though generally well acted, gives Weiss’s electrifying Pale free rein.

When writing the then-untitled play, Wilson is said to have inscribed "Burn this" at the top of every page, encouraging himself to be "bone honest" in the writing. Wealthy screenwriter Burton, who is Anna’s safer lover, says the way to create art is to "make it personal, tell the truth, and then write ‘Burn this’ on it." Indeed, the play begins with the flicker of a cigarette and ends with the roasting of a note — a matchmaking missive from the play’s fourth character, witty if jaded adman Larry, who having realized the guardedness of his own life morphs into a Will and Grace take on Cupid. On its romantic if arch surface, Burn This rubs together a hopped-up Heathcliff and a workaholic-twinkle-toes Cathy to spark fire. But underneath, this late-’80s play is a comment on isolated if cheek-by-jowl urban lives in a world where sexual contact may be comforting but deadly.

The Huntington revival, directed by Susan Fenichell, balances the excesses and the sophistication of the piece on a terrific set by James Noone that captures both the drama and the grime of the high-windowed industrial loft space shared by Anna and Larry, whose other roommate, Robbie, has been killed in a needless boating accident with his boyfriend. Anna, having lived through the marathon working-class-New-Jersey-family funeral (at which she was perceived as the grieving girlfriend), is devastated by how little his kin knew her beloved Robbie. None of them even saw him dance, she notes several times, with plaintive incredulity.

Anna, Larry, and Burton have been working through their shock and their bereavement when, a month after the funeral, a lurching, caterwauling midnight visit brings the drunken, agitated Pale — who looks like Robbie — to the apartment, ostensibly to pick up his brother’s things. Bristling like his sideburned coif, raging that the neighborhood has "crotch rot," threatening to burst at the heart or stomach, sobbing into a wadded expensive jacket, and toting a handgun in his pocket (he isn’t just glad to see her), this hyperkinetic, wounded emissary from another world triggers some deep desire in Anna. Perhaps in the wake of death, she’s attracted by so much exploding, careering life — which Weiss (of the NBC series The Pretender) makes dangerous, comical, and beckoning all at once.

Pale’s more urbane assaultees are well played at the Huntington — though Wilson arms them with sparklers and Pale with the arsenal of a suicide bomber. Anne Torsiglieri is a grounded yet bereft, emotionally fluid Anna. Brian Hutchison makes likable the stiff albeit artistically reaching Burton. And Nat DeWolfe, last seen at the Huntington carrying a severed head in a hatbox in Betty’s Summer Vacation, is an adorable Larry, wrapping his loneliness in gay stereotype and lobbing the snappiest lines with aplomb. The production supplies the right atmosphere, too, from the tumult of flashing lights beyond the fire escape to Candice Donnelly’s apt costumes, which include slinky formal wear, casual sweats, and even a Japanese "happy coat" worthy of ’80s Peter Sellars.

Burn This is not the "passionate modern classic" the Huntington thinks it is — though it’s curious that Boston had never seen a major professional production of the play. But as the Bard says, some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. Here the thrusting comes in the form of the expertly controlled, quicksilver chaos of Michael T. Weiss.