Producer David Binder (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Of Mice and Men) announces today that three-time Emmy Award nominee Adam Driver (Star Wars: The Last Jedi, "Girls") will return to Broadway in the first revival of Lanford Wilson's BURN THIS, directed by Tony Award winner Michael Mayer (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Spring Awakening) in 2019 at a Broadway theater to be announced.
BURN THIS tells the story of four New Yorkers whose lives are uprooted by a young dancer's accidental death. Set in downtown New York in the raw and gritty 1980s, the combustible drama explores the spiritual and emotional isolation of the dangerous, sexy, raw and demanding Pale (Adam Driver) and the modern dancer Anna, and their tempestuous relationship after the two iconoclasts are brought together in the wake of a life-changing personal tragedy.
The original production of BURN THIS premiered Off-Broadway in 1987 starring John Malkovitch as Pale and Joan Allen as Anna, before transferring to Broadway in a critically acclaimed, award-winning production that ran from October 14, 1987 through October 29, 1988 for a total of 437 performances at the Plymouth Theatre.
Additional casting and the design team will be announced shortly. 101 Productions, Ltd.will be the General Manager.
Adam Driver will soon be seen in Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi, premiering worldwide on December 15th. He was most recently seen in Steven Soderbergh's Logan Lucky, starring alongside Channing Tatum and Daniel Craig. He just completed shooting Spike Lee's The Black Klansman, where he plays an undercover police officer amidst a KKK resurgence in 1978 Colorado Springs and will be soon be seen in Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Driver won the Volpi Cup Award for Best Actor for Hungry Hearts, which premiered at the 2014 Venice International Film Festival. Recent credits include Martin Scorsese's Silence, Jim Jarmusch's Paterson, Jeff Nichols' Midnight Special, and J.J. Abrams' Star Wars: The Force Awakens. His other film credits include: While We're Young, This Is Where I Leave You, Tracks, Inside Llewyn Davis, Lincoln, Frances Ha, and J. Edgar. Driver also starred on HBO's critically acclaimed series "Girls." His performance in "Girls" garnered him three Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. His Broadway credits include Man and Boy (dir. Maria Aitken), opposite Frank Langella, as well as Mrs. Warren's Profession (dir. Doug Hughes) opposite Cherry Jones. Off-Broadway, he starred in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (dir. Sam Gold), which earned him the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Featured Actor. Prior to that, he took the stage as 'Louis Ironson' in The Signature's revival of Tony Kushner's Angels in America (dir. Michael Greif). In 2008, Driver founded Arts in the Armed Forces, a non-profit organization dedicated bringing live stage performance to active duty and veteran members of the US Armed Forces and their families. Driver is a Juilliard graduate and is a former Marine who was with 1/1 Weapons Company at Camp Pendleton, CA.
Michael Mayer's recent work includes Michael Moore's The Terms of My Surrender at the Belasco, the world premiere of Nico Muhly's opera Marnie at London's ENO, the U.K. tour of the record-breaking West End run of Funny Girl, the national tour of the Tony Award-winning revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, As You Like It for Toho Theatre Creation in Tokyo, and Love, Love, Love at the Roundabout. His Broadway credits include Spring Awakening (Tony Award/Best Musical and Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best Director; also London, Vienna, Tokyo, and Seoul productions); American Idiot (also co- author, Drama Desk Award for Best Director; also US, UK and Asia tours); Side Man (Tony Award/Best Play); Thoroughly Modern Millie (Tony Award/Best Musical); A View from the Bridge (Tony Award/Best Revival); Everyday Rapture; You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown; and Triumph of Love. Off-Broadway credits include: Lin-Manuel Miranda's 21 Chump Street (This American Life/BAM), Brooklynite (Also co- author, Vineyard), Whorl Inside A Loop (with Dick Scanlan, Second Stage), 10 Million Miles (Atlantic). Feature films include The Seagull (upcoming), A Home at the End of the World, and Flicka. Television: Smash (Pilot) for NBC and two seasons of Alpha House for Amazon. Metropolitan Opera: a celebrated new production of Rigoletto. He serves on the Board of New York Stage and Film.
Lanford Wilson (1937 - 2011) authored Balm in Gilead, The Rimers of Eldritch, The Gingham Dog, Lemon Skey, Serenading Louie, The Hot L Baltimore, The Mound Builders, Angels Fall, Burn This, Redwood Curtain, Trinity, Fifth of July, Talley & Son, Talley's Folly, Book of Days, Rain Dance, Sympathetic Magic and some 20 one-act plays including Brontosaurus, The Great Nebula in Orion and the paired A Poster of the Cosmos and The Moonshot Tape. For television, he wrote for "Taxi!" (no relation to the series) and "The Migrants," from a story by Tennessee Williams. He also wrote the libretto for Lee Hoiby's opera of Williams' Summer and Smoke and a new translation of Chekov's Three Sisters. Wilson co-founded (with Tanya Berezin, Rob Thirkield and Marshall W. Mason) the Circle Repertory Company in New York City and was a resident playwright there from 1969-1995. Awards include the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award in Theatre Arts, The Institute of Arts and Letters Award, The Edward Albee Last Frontier Award, The John Steinbeck Award, The Drama-Logue Award (Los Angeles) for Talley's Folly and Fifth of July, two New York Drama Critic's Circle Awards for Best Play (Talley's Folly and The Hot L Baltimore), two Obie Awards for Best Play (The Hot L Baltimore and The Mound Builders), an Obie Award for Sustained Achievement, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (Talley's Folly). He was a member of the Dramatists Guild Council. The theatre community as a whole deeply felt his loss in March 2011 when he passed away at the age of 73.
David Binder is a Tony Award-winning producer whose credits include Broadway, Off-Broadway and festivals. On Broadway, David produced Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which won four Tony Awards, including Best Revival. In July, Hedwig wrapped up a U.S. national tour at the Kennedy Center. His production of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, starring James Franco and Chris O'Dowd, was the first Broadway show to be filmed by NT Live. David's revival of A Raisin in the Sun starring Audra McDonald, Sean Combs and Phylicia Rashad, has been widely recognized for its diverse audiences and for its lasting impact on who comes to Broadway. Other credits include 33 Variations starring Jane Fonda, the Barbican/Toneelgroep Amsterdam production of Obsession directed by Ivo van Hove starring Jude Law, De La Guarda and Fuerza Bruta. He is the Guest Artistic Director of LIFT, the London International Festival of Theatre, which will take place in June 2018. He has been a teaching fellow at Princeton University, and for six years was on the faculty at the Yale School of Drama. His TED talk, The Arts Festival Revolution, has been seen online by more than a half million people.
Videos