Burn

Description
*** [THREE STARS] Thanks to some fine performances and brisk pacing, Creighton James’s two-hour "Burn" doesn't seem nearly as interminable as it might have. A hillbilly-gothic tale set in 1860s Appalachia, "Burn" takes nearly every cliché about the Old South-—racism! brutality! incest! miscegenation! hardscrabble livin’!-—then mixes in a flashback device that suggests a marriage between Faulkner and "The Blair Witch Project." The play opens in the present as a group of teenagers, flashlights in hand, stumble through the woods, looking for the ruins of the Old Stratton place--where, local legend has it, much evil of a possibly supernatural nature once occurred. They soon encounter a spooky figure wandering among the trees, who (instead of killing the kids off, as one might ordinarily expect in such a situation) proceeds to narrate the story of what actually happened there. This backwoods Virgil guides the young’uns through a reliably awful descent into hell, involving an unfortunate ménage among a logger, his mute niece and a sensitive, literate slave. Needless to say, things end badly. "Burn" is certainly engaging and intense, but in respect to its subject matter it seems, like Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” more condescending than illuminating.--Howard Halle, Editor-at-Large