BY J.J. MCGLONE

Director: Rory Pelsue
Scenic design: LILY GUERIN
Costume design: David Mitsch
Lighting design: Yichen Zhou

video design: erin sullivan
Choreography: allison jones
Sound design: Bailey Trieweiler

STAGE MANAGER: Kat Sciortino-Rivera

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Cast:

LELAND FOWLER, DANIEL LIU,

J.J. MCGOLNE, JULIAN SANCHEZ​

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press HIGHLIGHTS:

The gestures are small but loaded; every cot shift is a coup, every eye-roll a rebellion. Pelsue’s direction captures this choreography of social warfare with remarkable precision, maintaining a tempo just shy of delirium.

 

For all its wit and camp exuberance, Burn Book is, at its core, a serious work—a queer reckoning with the forms of theatricality that both liberate and endanger. Its lineage stretches from Genet’s sacred perversions to Albee’s savage domesticity to Waters’s joyous filth, yet its idiom is unmistakably its own: the idiom of a generation for whom performance is both armor and inheritance.

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In Pelsue’s confident direction and McGlone’s sharply intelligent writing, the split/decision production captures something of theater’s oldest paradox—that exposure is inseparable from transformation. Within the flickering half-light of the dormitory, as the boys-turned-witches dance, curse, and confess, one senses the oldest promise of the stage: that through artifice, something real might at last be revealed. If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, then heaven help the gay schoolboy who’s been outshone. 

Tony marinelli-theater beyond broadway​​​​