Burn Book
Written by JJ McGlone; Directed by Rory Pelsue
122CC - 122 Community Center | 150 First Avenue, New York, New York 10009
November 1 - November 14, 2025
Photo Credit: Viktorija Mickute
The boarding school drama has long provided fertile ground for theatrical exploration—its enclosed spaces, coded hierarchies, and ungoverned emotional intensities serving as miniature laboratories for desire and power. From Rattigan’s The Browning Version to Genet’s The Maids (transposed to a school setting), the dormitory has often stood as a site of both discipline and transgression: where authority is internalized and rebellion begins. JJ McGlone’s Burn Book, which recently premiered at 122CC under the direction of Rory Pelsue, joins this lineage with striking assurance. It is at once a parody and a resurrection of that tradition—a play that knows the rules of the schoolroom melodrama so well it can gleefully, even wickedly, rewrite them in lavender ink.
The premise is deceptively familiar: three boys in a boarding school, sharing a dorm room. A new boy arrives; tensions flare, secrets emerge, and the promise of friendship is shadowed by envy and betrayal. What distinguishes Burn Book is not its plot but its sensibility. This is not the repressed, tortured homoeroticism of Dead Poets Society or Maurice. This is the unapologetically queer fantasia of the post-Mean Girls generation: claws out, glitter flying, hexes at the ready. McGlone’s boys are “girls,” as he puts it—by which he means uncloseted, unabashedly queer, and fully self-aware of the theatricality of their existence. The play is, in essence, an experiment in what happens when the latent homoerotic charge of the boarding-school genre is no longer latent. Rather than repression, we get exuberant performance; rather than shame, satire; instead of secrecy, spectacle. As William proclaims, this particular room has the only gays in the village, or at least in the boarding school. The claim is dubious, of course, but it hardly matters: what McGlone gives us is a self-contained ecosystem of gay adolescence in its purest, most performative form. These are not boys hiding their difference—they brandish it, brand it, exalt it. Costume designer David Mitsch is at the ready. The dorm room becomes a shrine to self-fashioning, a drag atelier, a confession booth, and eventually, a witch’s lair.
McGlone, who also plays the role of William—the self-anointed leader of this insular quartet—has created a space at once absurd and recognizably real, set designer Lily Guerin’s blood-red dorm room that becomes a stage within a stage, and an inveterate canvas for lighting designer Yichen Zhou. The four boys—William, Ty (Leland Fowler), Lewis (Daniel Liu), and Warren (Julian Sanchez)—inhabit a world so hermetic that the audience never glimpses a teacher, a classmate, or even a corridor beyond their room of four cots. What might, in another play, feel claustrophobic becomes here an arena for performance, a queer echo chamber in which wit, cruelty, and affection rebound with volatile intensity.
Their banter—arch, rapid, merciless—evokes the acid exchanges of Mean Girls filtered through the stylized cruelty of Genet’s The Balcony. The dialogue crackles like a volley of thrown shade—rapid, reckless, and deeply funny. It’s a linguistic ballet of camp aggression, insecurity, and seduction. The rhythms are those of the cafeteria clique and the coven alike: cruel, intoxicating, irresistible. The hierarchy is quickly established: William, the reigning “queen bee,” rearranges the dorm’s sleeping order to place the new arrival Ty (darkly glamorous, Haitian, with enviable twerking prowess) beside him, demoting the loyal Lewis and further alienating the sulking Warren. 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.
Yet Burn Book is not content to remain a comedy of bitchery and bonding. McGlone introduces a metaphysical turn that complicates—and deepens—the play’s surface froth. The discovery of Ty’s secret “burn book,” a private compendium of names and symbols, becomes the catalyst for the group’s collective self-identification as witches. What begins as mock accusation (“You’re a witch!”) becomes a declaration of solidarity. Soon, the four are wearing skirts—a gesture both transgressive and pragmatic (“The dress code doesn’t forbid it”)—and conducting rituals of revenge that merge the iconography of Salem with the aesthetics of drag. The dorm transforms into a shimmering circle of invocation and destruction.
It is tempting to read this transformation as pure camp—an elaborate act of parody, The Craft by way of RuPaul’s Drag Race. But McGlone’s writing refuses to settle for that easy register. The coven’s antics—set to Erin Sullivan’s hilarious video interludes, carry a genuine sense of enchantment and danger. What begins as playacting slides toward the real; as the hexes escalate, so does the moral unease. When William manipulates his coven into enacting a curse on the wife of a male teacher he desires (again, there’s always a Mr. Proctor), the line between artifice and atrocity blurs. The play uncoils into something raw, cruel, and tragic. By the time the boys are summoned before the school deans, the hysterical laughter of the earlier scenes has curdled into horror. What began as playacting has become a witch hunt in earnest—metaphoric, literal, and finally, self-immolating.
Here McGlone’s dramaturgy reveals its lineage: one hears echoes of Albee’s psychological cruelty in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, of Genet’s eroticized power struggles, even of Waters’s anarchic queer exuberance. Like these predecessors, McGlone is fascinated by the theater of domination—the way language and performance can both mask and manifest desire. But his sensibility is distinctly of the digital age: irony without detachment, performance without privacy. The boys’ rituals, their “burn book,” their mock trials—all mirror the dynamics of social media, where the collective impulse to name, shame, and destroy is both communal and corrosive.
Indeed, the play’s titular object operates on multiple levels. A “burn book,” as any devotee of Mean Girls knows, is a scrapbook of defamation—a communal ledger of hatred. It becomes both weapon and confession, its pages documenting not only the vicious gossip of high school queens but the larger history of cultural persecution. McGlone reimagines it as a contemporary grimoire, a repository of adolescent vengeance that also serves as an allegory for the historical persecution of the “other,” anyone who dares to dance outside the line. In its conflation of the witch trials of New England with the micro-politics of queer adolescence, Burn Book locates the same structure of exclusion at work: the urge to purify, to expel, to burn what cannot be contained. The play’s final scenes—culminating in a betrayal that collapses play-acting into punishment—make this connection explicit. The boys’ witchcraft, once a game, becomes evidence against them. In their persecution, McGlone finds a mordant reflection of contemporary cancel culture, in which confession and condemnation are two faces of the same ritual. The “burn” of the title thus comes to signify both destruction and illumination—the fire that consumes and the fire that reveals.
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.
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.
Click HERE for tickets.
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on November 12, 2025. All rights reserved.