As the music fades, a blonde woman fumbles for her cigarrette in the dark, tries to light it, and fails. The flame illuminates her face, which is screwed up in concentration. She tries to light it again. Eventually the cigarrette catches.

Burn This

By Lanford Wilson

Produced and directed by Dan Balsam

In the Mather House TV Room

Tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m.

The Mather House production of Burn This is not so lucky. Very little catches in this play. The actors lack chemistry and charisma; the set, a carpeted room with a couch that is supposed to side as a dance studio, is unrealistic. The costumes are implausible, and the synthesized music is gratingly tinny.

Wilson's script concerns itself with big themes like art, death, sex and love, and it addresses them in the lower Manhattan apartment of Anna (Nell Benjamin) and her friend Larry (Alan Krischer).

Anna and Larry have recently lost their roommate, Robby, a gay dancer who died in a boating accident. They are left to deal with personal grief and to grapple with the tragedy of the death of a talented artist. It becomes an even more difficult task when Robby's angry, crass brother Pale (Brian Gaspardo), continually crashes their apartment, disrupts their life and finds comfort in having sex with Anna.

It is a potentially powerful play that slips easily into the cliched with Balsam's poor directing job. Benjamin, Krischer and Gaspardo seem to have no idea how to treat these themes. The fourth cast member, Allan Barton, playing Anna's monied lover Burton, seems equally ill-equipped to tackle the problems of modern life which Wilsor's play addresses.

In a play with such a small cast, the interaction and timing become critical. The choreography of these players, however, was nothing like clockwork--they seemed either to be tripping over each other's lines or waiting for the delayed delivery of a forgotten one. They did not seem to react at all to each other with any genuine passion, largely because their characters were disingenuously played.

Krischer is the worst offender--he makes Larry a flat, hackneyed homosexual. He invariably delivers his lines looking vacuously into space, with his hand pressed to his chest. This becomes so habitual a gesture we begin to wonder if his body parts have somehow been fused together.

Benjamin is equally ungraceful, and her character is a dancer, She wobbles in high heels, is painfully unflexible when she stretches and moves awkwardly through the all-too-generous stage space. Anna is supposed to be a fragile artist who feels deeply. Onstage, however, she is little more than vapid. Her love scenes with Burton or Pale are universally devoid of sexual energy, and the eventual fade-out to tinny music is welcome.

Barton, playing Burton, is little help in the matter, given now dispassionately he plays his character. When he comes on stage, he strokes his chin in a failed attempt to seem the deep, pensive writer. But when he refers to his work, he is uninspired.

Gaspardo is the strongest player. If a one-note character, he is at least energetic. And he has wonderful monologues to deliver. It is curious, though, that in delivering them he occasionally breaks the fourth wall and yells at the audience. As if we haven't suffered enough.

But the characters are suffering, too. Especially Anna. She dances, yet her studio apartment is carpeted. She probably has horrible rug burns. And she has unbearably tacky ballet posters hanging in her apartment that she has to look at every day. She has painfully boring sex with both her lovers. And she clearly lives with the psychological stress of having ESP--she always reaches to answer the phone before it actually rings.

Everyone in this play smokes at one point or another. It's the director's way of showing us that these people are sensitive, artistic types. We'd never guess it on our own. They certainly don't dress like artists--Larry, inexplicably, is given to wearing sneakers and inside-out Mather House intramural t-shirts.

It is easy to take pot shots at the show, but it is hard to sit through it. The kindest thing that can be said is that the play could have been good--and that some of the playwright's funny lines did not get lost.