Mostly Star Wars

The first Burn this reviews are out:

“When Adam Driver barrels onto the stage as the coked-up restaurant manager Pale in Burn This, he doesn’t just give off sparks, he threatens to explode, blowing out the full wall of industrial glass windows in designer Derek McLane’s converted Lower Manhattan warehouse set. It’s no mystery why Keri Russell’s exponentially more composed dancer Anna would be both frightened and mesmerized by the twitchy stranger who has burst in on her, railing about the trials of finding parking on potholed New York City streets, the invasiveness of phone messages, and in one particularly spectacular aria, the meaninglessness of polite interjections like “I’m sorry.” As stage entrances go, it’s a stunner.

In a performance of astonishing physicality that marks an exciting return to the New York stage after a seven–year break, Driver maintains that dangerous energy throughout the production — whether the feral intruder is reeling about the room in a drunken stupor, doubled over with racking sobs of grief or warily surrendering to an emotional involvement he can’t control.

With his rangy frame clad in big-shouldered ‘80s suits and voluminous satiny shirts that indicate more amusing vanity than taste, Pale quite literally fills the stage. Even the heat he gives off is palpable. “I got like a toaster oven I carry around with me in my belly someplace,” he says, and we feel it. Driver has an in-the-moment presence that’s almost scary.” - The Hollywood Reporter

“[…]  Driver plays Pale as a man-child with mad mood swings, displaying brilliant flashes of danger, absurdity, anguish and insight. He is coarsely funny in his tirades about Manhattan parking, four-ply toilet paper and clanging heating pipes, yet he is also fastidious, down to the crease and cut of his pants and his ad-hoc tea cozy. He is seemingly homophobic and misogynistic, but also tenderhearted. He’s uber-alpha yet he sobs uncontrollably when emotions get the best of him, which is often.

Vital to the success of this fascinating, flawed (don’t peer too closely at the details) and overlong play is the casting, especially in the leads that require an audience to believe that such disparate people can find a safe haven in each other’s arms.

Driver, a mesmerizing presence in TV’s “Girls” and the latest “Star Wars” trilogy, lives up to expectations of the showcase role originally played by John Malkovich. Driver is riveting here, and audiences will identify with Anna’s dilemma of both wanting him to leave and needing him to stay.” - Variety

“Pale (Adam Driver) makes his entrance crashing and burning. It’s the middle of the night, and he’s never met Anna (Keri Russell) or Larry (Brandon Uranowitz), the erstwhile roommates of his younger brother, who died in an accident the month before. But he barges into their apartment anyhow, without warning, drunk and coked up, wild with half-coherent rage and guilt and grief. (Anna calls him truculent; “like a truck,” explains Larry.) Pale is the kind of steamroller role that is irresistible to actors—a sexy beast whose brutish pride masks a deep well of pain—and Driver gives it everything he’s got. He’s terrific, and slightly terrifying. Even in the vastness of  Anna and Larry’s open, spare, high-ceilinged loft, there seems barely enough space to contain him. “ - Time Out 

“He [Driver] not only gives a towering performance, he is a tower. If the Ponce Monolith at Tiwanaku ever came to life, it would be Driver’s Pale. This guy’s not just pre-Colombian, he’s downright primordial, and speaks English as if it were a second language coming from a person who never got around to learning a first language. Pale’s tirades show Wilson in peak form, and Driver does them full justice as he races from insult to demand to petty concern and then back to insult and demand and concern about his trousers not being properly pressed.

The question in this very lively parody of “Burn This” is not why Anna ends up with Pale. It’s how she survives sex with Pale.“ - The Wrap

“Driver—a recent Oscar nominee for Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, and a megastar thanks to his role as Kylo Ren, née Ben Solo, in the Star Wars films—has always been a fine stage actor (highlights: 2009’s The Retributionists and 2012’s Look Back in Anger), but he’s a veritable force here. He makes the most of Pale’s cocaine-fueled quirkiness—pulling off his $245 “genuine lizard shoes” that are “fuckin’ killing” his foot, demanding to know why because “you’d think a lizard’s got to be supple, right?”—without taking it over the top.” - New York Stage Review

“Burn This premiered on Broadway in 1987 and won actress Joan Allen a Tony Award. It could do the same for Adam Driver, who provides the flame for a play that, without a star performance, could easily fizzle out. […]

Pale (Driver in a primal, ferocious performance), storms into her apartment one day to pick up his brother’s possessions, she finds herself falling for him against her better judgment as they mourn Robbie’s death together. […]

Fortunately, this production features an explosive performance that heats things up. Driver’s blazing-hot portrayal of the high-strung, coke-snorting Pale ignites the stage like a force of nature. When he enters Anna’s apartment, strafing the room with F-bombs as he rails about the god-awful parking situation in New York and plops his huge lizard-skin shoe on Anna’s red Victorian-style couch to tie the laces, we know we’re dealing with a formidable character (costume designer Clint Ramos decks Driver in fabulous suits that make the tall actor look even more physically imposing).” - Theater mania

“Adam Driver gives a sublimely physical performance in this Broadway revival of Lanford Wilson’s 1987 play. As a piece of writing Burn This is far better at character than it is at plot, but Driver makes it come alive, to the point that Michael Mayer’s bright production dims when he’s not on stage.

[…]

In Driver’s hands, Pale is a maelstrom of a man, capable of erupting into violence or desire in an instant. Driver avoids lapsing into class stereotypes as he constructs and deconstructs the character’s masculinity. After Pale shames Larry over his poor tea preparation skills, Driver even manages to turn the act of tea-making into something unexpectedly loving.

Deadline: Despite its woes, the film is ultimately optimistic.

It is a joyous film. That’s what I like about it. There’s no sign of the pain or the agony or any of that. That’s what I always wanted on my films. Forget about the maker or the making, does it exist in its own world if you’ve never heard anything about it? Will you enjoy it? Will you see something different? And it’s so strange because, even structurally, it’s an odd film. It’s many films, it really is. It shifts and changes. This film doesn’t play by rigid rules. It’s alive, and that’s what I like about it. That was the whole plan.

And it’s why Adam [Driver] is so f–king brilliant beyond brilliant. The fact that I got Adam in this film… It was Amy, my daughter, who was producing it, who said, “You’ve got to meet this guy.” I don’t even know if I’d seen the Star Wars with him. I went and I met him and it was one of those totally instinctive moments. He’s not at all like an actor. He’s not a standard good-looking leading man. But I just knew it, even if I had no idea he would be as brilliant as he was. Every day he was coming in and being funnier and funnier.

Adam told me last night that he’d planned it all out before he got to set, and then he found himself in scenes where Jonathan [Pryce] was at his funniest, and he didn’t know what was going on. When I look at the film now, that stuff works really well because Adam wasn’t able to follow whatever plan he had. So much was ad-libbed. He’s going, “What the hell is going on? Jonathan is stealing every scene. This is my film!” All of that stuff, somehow, worked to the benefit of the movie.

The movie was making itself, I was just holding on for dear life.

BlacKkKlansman’ Cast Gush Over Director Spike Lee

What is unique about him, I feel, is the familial atmosphere that’s on set. He’s someone that’s a very big proponent of impulse and instinct. He kind of encourages you to trust that if you don’t trust it yourself, and is very much about momentum on set. Which I think is very unique to him.

“Adam Driver is spectacular here; in many ways, his transformation while working with Ron is just as compelling as Ron’s in its subtlety. Flip admits he never had to think much about his identity because he wasn’t raised culturally Jewish and never had to identify with it one way or the other. “Now,” he says, after withstanding some upsetting questioning by one of the Klan members who suspects he might not be Aryan Pure, ‘I think about it all the time.’” - Vulture

“Meanwhile, Driver displays his usual casual command, playing Flip as a man with his own  identity issdues. (He’s Jewish, another group of people despised by the Klan.) The deeper Flip embeds himself within the KKK, his loyalty is constantly questioned, forcing him to remain cool no matter the danger. Driver is excellent at portraying unflappability, although always hunting at the character’s inner anxiety.” - ScreenDaily

“Unleashing the pent-up testosterone that percolated beneath his roles in ‘Girls’ and ‘Star Wars,’ Driver leans into every one of the self-loathing epithets that Flip uses as a disguise. He does a brilliant job of registering the toll that it takes, every anti-semitic jab pushing him closer to a real confrontation with the Jewish identity that he’s always kept like a half-forgotten secret.” - IndieWire

“But, there’s still the issue of having to meet Walter in person. Enter Flip Zimmerman (a never better Adam Driver). He practices his Stallworth voice until he’s ready to put the plan into action and the two create a sort of Cyrano de Bergerac with Stallworth providing the voice relationship and Zimmerman satisfying the in-person white quotient.” - Awards Watch

“When it comes to meeting the Klan, a white police colleague, played by the ever-excellent Adam Driver, poses as Stallworth.” - The Times