Burn . Austin Chronicle . 03-30-98

Burn

DIRECTED BY: Scott Storm

REVIEWED: 03-30-98

A nearly empty Hollywood apartment, writing scrawled on the azure walls. In it, a solitary chair and a desk with a typewriter and a neatly arranged stack of paper, an offering to an unappreciative muse. The occupant, naked, unkempt, smoking nervously, crouches in the center of the floor, as if the walls were his prison and his jailer due any moment. The jailer, though, is blithely unaware of his role, and when he shows up is unprepared for the prisoner's reaction. Tom is a glib, self-centered fellow whom the muse has favored. Having just finished his novel (on a pentium processor computer, no doubt), Tom returns to California and his old pal Ben, a writer whose manual typewriter has cobwebs between the keys. The two haven't seen each other in a long time, and Tom, having forgotten, or never having acknowledged, the rift between them, is eager for his friend to read (and admire) his manuscript. Admiration, of course, is not what awaits Tom, for Ben, endlessly adrift in that blue apartment has had nothing to do but bank the embers of his resentment. Burn is very nearly an interesting character study, a minute examination of self-awareness, creativity, anger, and friendship, of catalysts, both perceived and unrecognized. It's a tight, confined wordplay, staged entirely within a single room, its emptiness amplifying each word. That being so, each word, each movement should be feeding our anticipation, drawing us in. But Burn falls just short. Neither the script nor the actors are quite strong enough. We bob at the edge, continuously caught, then released by the waves, the emotional current never quite strong enough to draw us all the way in.

--Hollis Chacona

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