“The crazy thing about Burn This, is it feels like it’s been on everybody’s syllabus except for mine,” says actor Brandon Uranowitz of the Lanford Wilson play. Uranowitz joins Adam Driver, Keri Russell and David Furr for a new production that officially opens tonight at the Hudson Theatre in New York.
In Burn This, Uranowitz plays Larry, a gay man who shares an apartment with Anna (Russell), a dancer. As the play opens they are trying to process the passing of their third roommate, Robbie, who was killed in a boating accident. She has both Larry and her boyfriend, Burton (Furr), to help comfort her. As they struggle to comprehend this tragedy, Robbie’s brother Pale (Driver) shows up. He’s a hurricane of a human being and there is often debris left in his wake.
Uranowitz made his Broadway debut in Baby It’s You in 2011. He’s appeared in An American in Paris and Falsettos, both of which found him receiving Tony Award nominations. Burn This marks his first play on Broadway.
“As soon as I read this,” Uranowitz says during rehearsals, “I thought, ‘this is me.’ How did I miss this? This is a dream role I never dreamed of having. I grew up in New Jersey and seeing shows all the time. For some reason it eluded me.”
Burn This had its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1987. Joan Allen, John Malkovich, Lou Liberatore and Jonathan Hogan starred. The production transferred to New York and ran for a year.
Liberatore had described the role of Larry as a the comic relief. But Uranowitz doesn’t see it quite that simply.
“He’s got a lot of zingers,” he says of the role. “But my goal is to bring as much truth and humanity to the stage, regardless of what their function is in the show. I come at every single line from a place of ‘what does he want in this moment.’ You can’t ignore the fact that Wilson wrote this play in the thick of this horrible epidemic. Not only does Larry lose his roommate he’d be living with for three years, but his entire community is disappearing around him. If you think about it, his sense of humor is his armor. So it’s not there just to add levity, it’s rooted in something very profound and emotional and a little dark.”
The epidemic to which Uranowitz refers is, of course, AIDS. Something the actor feels Wilson was indirectly addressing in Burn This.
“It feels like there are two plays going on at once,” he offers. “There’s the inner turmoil, but what you see is what they say on the surface. But everything underneath motivates what you hear. It feels like a microcosm, him speaking about this epidemic and this crisis without speaking about it. If we get it right and we evoke the time period, somehow the AIDS crisis will creep into your experience of the show.”
I asked Uranowitz about a line in act one where his character says, “There are some things so true they enter your soul as you hear them.” Did Burn This as a play do that for him?
“Immediately. As soon as I read it, particularly this character, but this play generally, it felt like it was a part of me somehow. This character was running through my veins and thinking my thoughts and articulating things in a way I have understood for years. It’s so funny that you bring up that line. It’s one of my favorite lines. It represents everything this play is about.”
Lest we think Larry is a third wheel in the play, he does something incredibly generous at the end (which won’t be revealed here). And it’s that generosity Uranowitz thinks is necessary for his character to move on in life.
“You see him throughout the play taking care of Anna. He helps Pale. But he never give himself love. He realizes it is time to take his life in his hands and take control. In doing so, he offers this generous act to Anna. She releases him from the rut they’re in.”
When Wilson was asked by the New York Times about the play in a 1987 interview, he said Burn This “is not about a monster sniffing at the window. It’s about the monster within. And that’s the territory I consider dangerous.” Does Uranowitz think that holds true for 2019?
“I think he’s right. It’s a play about human beings finding themselves. These characters are very much finding where they fit in this world. We sort of only have ourselves to hold onto, I think. It feels important, particularly for Larry. It doesn’t feel dated. It feels current which is sort of sad to me. This play happened during the Reagan Administration when no one was listening and they wanted us to shut the fuck up. I sort of feel we’re in a very similar situation where they are trying to push us back in the shadows and undo all the progress we made. It’s about us looking inward and reconciling those inner monsters. How we can be better people, how they can be more productive and more compassionate people. That’s a clarion call for us right now.”
Burn This is scheduled to run through July 14th. For tickets go here.
Main photo: Brandon Uranowitz and Keri Russell in Burn This. All photos by Matthew Murphy.
Update: Brandon Uranowitz was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role for his work in Burn This