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volatile
✧
intimate
✧
electric
“Burn This is the kind of play that reminds us how volatile, intimate, and alive theatre can be. Lanford Wilson writes about grief, desire, art, and connection with extraordinary heat and precision, placing four people in a room where everything carefully held together begins to crack open. We’re drawn to this play because it is messy, funny, dangerous, and theatrical: a modern classic that is still startlingly immediate.”
Burn This
by Lanford Wilson
directed by Emilia Sargent
Presented at the Shimberg Playhouse
Straz Center for the Performing Arts
1010 N Macinnes Pl, Tampa, FL 33603
Preview July 15, 2027
OPENING NIGHT July 16, 2027, 7:30pm
PRE-SHOW CELEBRATION July 16, 2027, 6pm
Join us for our traditional pre-show mix & mingle to celebrate the heat both outdoors and in our private hearts.
Run July 15 – August 1, 2027
Season Sponsors:
The Gobioff Foundation
Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners
Andrea Graham & Geoff Simon
Ticketing Sponsor:
Russell Buchan
Opening Night Sponsors:
Andrea Graham & Geoff Simon
In the sweltering heat of a New York summer, four lives collide in the aftermath of a sudden loss. Anna, a dancer, is trying to rebuild her life after the death of her roommate and creative partner when Pale, the dead man’s reckless and magnetic brother, bursts through her door and upends everything she thought she understood about grief, desire, and survival.
Winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play, Lanford Wilson’s Burn This is a charged, funny, and combustible modern classic about art, intimacy, and the dangerous pull of being truly seen.
“Wilson’s subject is the spontaneous combustion that erupts between two people who have no business trafficking with one another.”
– The Washington Post
“It’s a free-wheeling urban romance that’s funny, contemporary and not afraid to be a little sentimental around the edges.”
– Los Angeles Times
“A powerful, dazzlingly comic play about love, art and social disintegration in a SoHo loft.”
– Daily News
“Pale is the kind of steamroller role that is irresistible to actors — a sexy beast whose brutish pride masks a deep well of pain.”
– Time Out New York