Susie Wang: Burnt Toast
Written and Directed by Trine Falch
NYU Skirball | 566 LaGuardia Pl, New York, NY 10012
November 5 - November 8, 2025
Where, indeed, does one begin with Burnt Toast? Norwegian company Susie Wang have concocted a theatrical experience that resists easy categorization — a surrealist horror fable, an exercise in endurance, a meticulous puzzle-box of allusion and discomfort. It is, without question, a very clever piece of theatre: the staging alone allows for an array of ingenious transformations; the sound design hums and crackles with ominous intent; and the script, laced with sly nods to the horror canon, rewards those attuned to its cinematic DNA. It is unquestionably an evening of jaw-dropping technical brilliance and intellectual craft.
The evening begins in apparent banality — a deliberate feint. Danny Iwas (Kim Atle Hansen) arrives at the hotel reception like a man already halfway through a fever dream — his right hand shackled, quite literally, to a gleaming steel briefcase. The gesture alone is arresting, a visual metaphor so brazen it borders on comic: a man chained to his past, dragging the weight of his mother’s death behind him like a cursed inheritance. When Danny, with unnerving calm, reveals that the briefcase contains the remains of his deceased mother, the tone lurches from dark comedy to something far more grotesque.
At the front desk, a solicitous yet slightly unhinged receptionist named Betty (Julie Solberg) greets him. Their exchange, all molasses-thick Southern drawls and hyper-articulated gestures, moves at the pace of coagulating blood. Every word is elongated, every motion exaggerated. We are left dangling in suspense, waiting for something — anything — to rupture the uncanny calm.Their exchange flirts with the absurd — all coquettish smiles and exaggerated vowels — a pantomime of Southern hospitality in which something faintly rancid seems to simmer just beneath the surface. Suddenly, the flirtation acquires a necrotic undercurrent; desire and death intertwine, and the hotel lobby becomes a purgatorial stage where no one is quite who they seem. Each character clings to their own secret hunger — for love, for control, for absolution — and as the night wears on, those hungers metastasize into something uncontainable. What begins as a polite exchange at check-in descends into an infernal farce of possession and loss, where the living and the dead appear to share the same room rate.
Enter Violet (Mona Solhaug), another guest, a new mother who nonchalantly begins to breastfeed her infant in the lobby — an image at once tender, transgressive, and deeply unsettling in its matter-of-factness. Her presence shifts the scene’s center of gravity, a tempo that shifts not toward resolution but deeper disquiet. Her encounter with Danny evolves with alarming speed from tentative flirtation to invasive intimacy. It is as though we are watching two moths circle a flame that we cannot yet see. What was flirtation becomes a contest; what was politeness curdles into performance. Both women, in their own ways, vie for Danny’s attention, their rivalry oscillating between seduction and hostility, maternal instinct and predatory impulse.
To reveal more would be to diminish the perverse pleasures of discovery, but suffice to say that what begins as social awkwardness metastasizes into psychological horror. Over the course of eighty minutes, Burnt Toast unspools a miniature study of coercion and cruelty — a toxic relationship rendered through grotesque imagery and ritual repetition. Lines first uttered in jest or affection return later as weapons. “You’re so small,” murmured tenderly early on, becomes a lash of belittlement when echoed in fury. A casual comment about a blood stain transforms, under pressure, into an indictment. These linguistic mutations form the architecture of the play’s horror: the ways language curdles, and love rots in its own repetition.
Meanwhile, Susie Wang’s trademark absurdist sensibility pushes everything to the edge of irritation. Kudos to Martin Langlie’s immersive music + sound design in offering Betty’s incessant typing and gum-chewing as they echo like psychological warfare; Danny and Violet’s slurping and sipping the complimentary eggnog cocktails amplify into an aural torment. Phillip Isaksen’s lighting conserves the wattage, allowing the audience to see only what they need to see at the moment. The company seems to delight in testing the audience’s threshold — how much tedium, how much sensory provocation, can we endure before we, too, snap?
Visually, the production is a triumph of restrained menace. Bo Krister Wallstrøm’s set, dominated by a blood-red wall, two elevator doors, and a reception desk positioned dead center, evokes the uncanny geometry of Kubrick’s The Shining. The audience is seated on the NYU Skirball stage, mere feet away from all the gore. Our closeness implies acceptance, does it not? Yet within its simplicity lie marvels — small mechanical miracles, eerie transformations, moments of genuine stagecraft sorcery. With effects this meticulously orchestrated, every moment feels like a Christmas morning waiting for the next gift to appear.
For all its craft, Burnt Toast’s deliberate pacing and intellectual remove risk alienation; the audience’s fascination occasionally gives way to fatigue. There is pleasure in decoding its symbols and cinephilic Easter eggs, in tracing its aesthetic lineage, but those pleasures can feel solitary — coolly cerebral rather than visceral. Moreover, the entire production is steeped—no, marinated—in the sensibility of David Lynch, that master alchemist of the uncanny. Like Lynch, Wang possesses the rare ability to invert the polarity of perception: the ordinary becomes unutterably strange, and the strange assumes the eerie calm of the everyday. A hotel lobby lamp flickers just so, and suddenly we are not in a building but in a dream about one. The banal hum of an elevator morphs into an omen. It is that particular species of surrealism which feels less imagined than remembered from some half-forgotten nightmare.
As the story advances, the influence of Cronenberg seeps ever more palpably through the cracks. The body, here, is neither vessel nor victim but battleground — an organism in revolt, where identity liquefies and the boundary between flesh and psyche collapses. Wang’s horror is not of jump-scares but of slow transfiguration: skin that remembers, desire that decays, matter that mutinies. And then, threading through it all, are unmistakable whispers of Stephen King, that laureate of dread who finds terror in the architecture of the familiar. The nods to The Shining’s Overlook Hotel are deliberate and knowing — the red walls, the symmetrical corridors, the inescapable sense that the building itself is the most sentient character on stage. The production’s pacing, too, recalls Kubrick’s icy precision: every movement calibrated, every silence measured to the millisecond. Falch’s world-building unfolds with the same glacial patience, the same geometric control, so that by the time the horror reveals itself, we realize it has been there all along — hiding in plain sight, behind the wallpaper, beneath the velvet carpet, smiling back at us from the lobby mirror.
And yet, even as one leaves the theatre — dazed, intrigued, faintly queasy — the images persist: a briefcase that seems to breathe, a mother’s lullaby that curdles into a scream, the vivisected fetus, within another vivisected fetus, within another vivisected fetus: a nauseating take on Russian Matryoshka dolls, the gleam of red light on velvet carpet. Burnt Toast is not easily loved, but it is impossible to forget. Susie Wang’s work lingers like the aftertaste of something burned — bitter, brilliant, and wholly unlike anything else on stage today.
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on November 10, 2025. All rights reserved.