The Living Room’s open-spaced, smoldering Burn This

Anger, confusion, denial, isolation, longing — anyone dealing with grief knows these emotions. So do most people who have been in love. Lanford Wilson’s 1987 Burn This tells, through its effluent talk, a story of love conceived in grief.

Four characters inhabit Burn This, but Wilson is mostly concerned with two of them: Anna, a dancer and choreographer, and Pale, a restaurant manager. Their disparate lives overlap by one degree of separation — Robbie, her friend and his brother, who has just died in an accident. The grief that binds them at times feels overwhelming. But it’s sorrow that meets us at the start of this rambling two-act, now at the Living Room and directed by Scott Cordes.

Anna (Vanessa Severo) has returned from the wake and funeral of her gay roommate and performance partner. She tries to concentrate on her work, piecing together a dance in front of her mirrored wall (Severo is also choreographer for this production), but she can’t focus. She’s too distracted by despair — which the actress makes palpable — to accomplish anything.

She is attended by her boyfriend, Burton (Bruce Michael Hall), a well-to-do, well-paid and well-known screenwriter who believes “there are no good movies,” and by her other roommate, Larry (Alex Espy), a graphic designer who likens his work for an ad agency to whoring. All three artists say they want to produce something meaningful, something lasting. “I thought everything important to the future of dance was going to happen in this room,” Anna says of her work with Robbie. Burton is drafting a screenplay, a love story, but can’t grasp what “that power” is, the thing that’s “felt much deeper than we know.” It’s easier not to delve.

Anna and Larry have been mourning now for days, but Burton has just learned about the accident. They share a circuitous conversation that mostly eludes their sadness. And this is how the human psyche often deals with loss; it forgets for a while, wandering away on tangents before landing again on the raw sore that must be tended. “You want quiet, leave me alone?” Larry asks Anna. “Or maybe talk about it and cry? You know me. I’m always willing to drape the joint in crepe.” It’s easier for them to remain preoccupied with surface than with what’s below it, reflected perhaps in their frequent stops, sometimes for a moment, in front of Anna’s mirror. Or maybe they’re looking for something.

We don’t meet Pale (Rusty Sneary) until well into Act 1, when he crashes into the scene, a force of nature. His arrival changes the characters’ lives, and the story. Where Burton comes from wealth, a family he calls “comatose,” Pale is part of a clan that goes on “for days,” whose men Anna says are “gorgeous” in a “blue-collar, working-at-the-steel-mill kind of way.” Pale doesn’t edit his speech or hide behind it, doesn’t let decorum get in the way of expressing himself.

His raw energy and emotions, his lack of control, frighten Anna. But the man isn’t without refinement, and he finds a path to her, too. Their need to connect is intense, and the actors give off a pheromonal drive. Sneary unleashes rapid-fire monologues that charge the play, and the room. Severo makes Anna vulnerable and sensitive but also plays her as a woman searching for her center.

The Living Room stages this play on the third floor of its downtown warehouse, setting it in the script’s loft apartment. The characters move freely around this large space (including use of the freight elevator and a couple of out-of-view areas), lending authenticity to the world of these 1980s New Yorkers and giving the action a circularity that mimics the story’s telling. The scale sometimes slows the play’s momentum, but it doesn’t blunt the ultimate emotional power.