Skirmishing Along the Borders BURN THIS

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Scenes from contemporary Manhattan life: a leggy choreographer, who can swing the rent on her funky loft apartment only by sharing it with two gay male roommates, sprawls and stares, momentarily graceless in grief. One of them, who was also her collaborator, has died in a boating accident; the other, whose solace she craves, is not at home. Her boyfriend shows up, and she tries to send him away. Their sexual and romantic intimacy cannot begin to compare with the bond she felt toward the dead man who shared her work. She has never had -- is not sure she has ever wanted -- what other people call a personal life.

This unsettling premise is set up in the opening minutes of, oddly enough, a comedy, the first noteworthy new play of the Broadway season, which officially began in May. Burn This starts out as a sly sketch of the way we live now, making fun equally of hip characters onstage and of the dead roommate's unseen blue-collar family. Then the show metamorphoses into a scary collision between those two cultures. Finally it becomes a romance between the elegant choreographer and the dead man's explosive, disturbing older brother -- a sexually charged clash of classes reminiscent of It Happened One Night or, in its brutality and danger, of the misfit infatuation in Requiem for a Heavyweight. The final scene is a rapprochement so tentative that it is played entirely in the dark: these reluctant lovers are unable even to look at each other.

At three hours, Burn This is too long and digressive, but as staged by Marshall W. Mason and a splendid young cast, it wins laughter in even its unnerving moments. If the narrative is indebted to the mainstream past, the tone has a more avant-garde echo of Sam Shepard -- a border skirmish between knockabout farce and knockdown violence. Yet Playwright Lanford Wilson manages to integrate well-crafted gags, mostly for the surviving gay roommate (Lou Liberatore). He describes his friend's gaudy casket as looking "like a giant Spode soup tureen." He says to the choreographer (Joan Allen) about her boyfriend (Jonathan Hogan), "I don't know why you don't just marry him and . . . buy things." In mock self-pity he demands, "Have you ever been to a gay New Year's Eve party? The suicide rate is higher than all of Scandinavia put together."

In 1980 Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize for Talley's Folly and Broadway acclaim for Fifth of July, companion pieces set on the same Missouri homestead. In Burn This, he reaches for a less sentimental key. But onstage the louder voice belongs to John Malkovich, a rising star (Death of a Salesman with Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman's film of The Glass Menagerie) doing an Actors Studio- style star turn. As the intrusive brother, he slams in, bounces off walls, spews a stream of unapologetic profanity, all the while wearing -- at the actor's insistence -- a shoulder-length black wig that brings to mind Laurence Olivier camping it up as Richard III. Fortunately, Malkovich has a gift for suggesting depths in inarticulate characters: the audience laughs with, not at, him when he says of his grief and drunkenness, "This has made me -- you know -- not as whatever as I usually am." In truth, he is much more whatever than ever. But Burn This prospers more from his talents than it suffers from his excesses, and a surprising number of its seemingly throwaway moments linger and ripen in memory.