[In the following review of Burn This, Montez explores the theme of intimacy and its relevance in a New York City setting, post-September 11, 2001.]

Burn This ends with the play's two main characters, Anna and Pale, holding each other in an embrace full of uncertainty and grief. In the first of the Signature Theatre's productions devoted to Lanford Wilson over the 2002-2003 season, the pair, played by Catherine Keener and Edward Norton, close the play with a look towards an empty bed hovering in a loft above Anna's bedroom. This unoccupied space manages to assert an overwhelming presence throughout the production. Once belonging to Robbie—Anna's friend and Pale's brother—the bed acts as a continual reminder of absence and haunts the interactions that occur within the larger setting of the play. Pale and Anna's developing intimacies do not so much ring as a union of two people hopelessly in love as they do of a kind of grasping to fill a loss that remains wholly unprocessed. The overarching grief of the production is fueled by a stifling wash of silences and denials whose visibility is precipitated in those moments where Anna must confront familial relations from Robbie's past.

When the play opens, Anna has recently returned from a wake for Robbie. Robbie's death in a boating accident has left a palpable absence both in Anna's life and in the lower Manhattan loft where the play is set. While attending Robbie's funeral, Anna quickly realizes that his family does not openly recognize Robbie's homosexuality. Explaining the events of the wake to her other gay roommate, Larry, played by Dallas Roberts, Anna relays the anxiety and frustration of acting the part of grieving widow. Catherine Keener's performance as Anna conveys a fragile sturdiness as she struggles through her amusing, yet nightmarish, account of Robbie's wake. What for a moment might appear to be forced dialogue from a novice to the New York stage is in fact a skillful movement between distress and amusement. At times losing her words and focus, Keener drifts into a meditative space, suggesting a void that cannot be articulated through the words of the script.

Where Keener expertly evokes the complicated space of loss through her retreat from words, Edward Norton as Robbie's brother, Pale, bursts onto the scene spewing forth a barrage of words that fill the space with an energetic vitality. Through his manic rants and scattered meditations on the state of society, the character attempts to displace or redirect a seething pain. With remarkable precision, Norton delivers lines that, while offering crass and humorous breaks from the somber tone of the play, deftly convey an unspoken anxiety around the death of his brother and what confronts him in this haunted space.

During their first meeting, Anna comforts Pale, holding him on the couch as he cries and complains of bodily pain that is the manifestation of his grief. In this moment of intimacy, Pale asserts, “I'm fucking grieving here and you're giving me a hard-on.” The sexual chemistry that brings Anna and Pale together reflects an intimacy and longing conditioned by loss. Meeting in the wake of Robbie's death, the two form a connection where desire emerges as each seeks contact with another person from Robbie's life. While Anna is made painfully aware that she knows little of Robbie's existence before coming to New York, Pale struggles to obtain an idea of Robbie's life as an accomplished dancer. The encounter between these two offers both proximity and distance to the deceased as each confronts the parts of personal history that have been silenced, avoided, or made invisible in their interactions with Robbie. Intense sexual desire erupts into this difficult space. It is a longing that necessarily frustrates them even as their union fulfills the need for contact with one another.

Their desire for a connection, a force that compels these two because of, not in spite of, grief, offers a model of intimacy that speaks to the complicated ways in which many New Yorkers have come together in the face of great loss. Burn This originally premiered in 1987 at the height of AIDS activism, and Anna's experience of Robbie's funeral resonates deeply with the numerous accounts of funerals for gay men whose families did not acknowledge their homosexuality. The play, with its once-occupied bed as a marker of loss, implies an AIDS narrative, where two individuals negotiate intimacy in the wake of homosexual death. For many, all sexual intimacies and encounters are necessarily shaped by the absences precipitated by AIDS. The negotiation of bodily contact and the way individuals come to experience desire for one another have been deeply impacted by the traumatic effects of AIDS and its material and ephemeral presence in New York City. This revival of Burn This occurred during New York City's first annual remembrance of September 11, and the downtown setting of the play is in close proximity to Ground Zero. To suggest that the emotional drama of Burn This might speak to developing sexual intimacy in the wake of September 11, is not simply to replace one traumatic context for another in situating the production. Instead, the play offers a way to consider the manner in which multiple losses are inscribed in the material and emotional landscapes of New York and in turn take shape and fuel a desire for intimacy.

Following a painful encounter, when Anna insists that Pale leave her apartment and never return, Keener pulls the sheets from her bed determined to remove Pale's presence from her loft. At the end of the scene, her roommate has taken the ball of sheets from her as she decides to leave and go work in her studio. She halts, almost out the door, and quietly insists, “Don't wash the sheets”—a line which does not appear in the original text. The sheets, with Pale's smell and the trace of sex, represent a material marker for the intense relations that have occurred, registering not only Pale but also her lost friend, Robbie.