For all the Adam fans who didn’t make it out to Los Angeles for his run in Burn This, just a little taste of what we missed. There’s also a nice little Opening Night video featuring Adam talking about the play in the Multimedia section of the official site. (h/t Broadway World for the top video.)

Adam’s star turn in Burn This corralled a lot of critical notice. LA Weekly said that “Adam Rothenberg’s Pale is the hot, pounding heart of this production.” Los Angeles Broadway World thought that Adam was “astounding in a fearless portrayal of an intensely hurting individual.” Variety thought that “The talented Rothenberg, who blessedly lacks Malkovich’s distracting androgynous quality, offers a Pale who is believable, tough, utterly masculine …” And the Los Angeles Times noted that “Rothenberg, who looks a little like Willem Dafoe’s younger brother, has charisma and the right urban grace.”

In addition to all the raves, we got a new profile of Adam courtesy LA Stage Times’ Connie Danese:

Adam Rothenberg, playing the role created by John Malkovich, is a thoughtful and charismatic actor who explodes onto the stage in his first entrance like a modern-day Stanley Kowalski. How does he get to that peak so quickly? “Uhh,” he grins sheepishly, “Jump rope.” He pauses to add, “And a little Tai Chi. Then, well, you just throw yourself into the language and get your heart rate up.”

When asked about his training, Rothenberg is both charming and generous. “I have a wonderful teacher I would love to mention by the name of Alan Savage. I never went to acting school. I learned in the trenches working in black box theaters in New York. But this teacher has helped me a great deal. He stresses working with the text, understanding why you’ re saying something based on what the other person just said. I don’t know how to explain it. A lot of actors feel they need to be doing so many things, when at the end of the day if the writer has done his work you just show up, trust you’re enough and throw yourself into it.”

In the second act Rothenberg’s character shows a surprising sensitivity. “To me that section was just about dropping the rage and going with the language, which is so brilliant and beautiful. I felt the more I thought about what I was saying, the sensitivity just took care of itself.”

The Berkshire Eagle‘s Jeffrey Borak had some very nice comments about our Adam in his latest production, A Doll’s House at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Calling Adam “brilliant in projecting a whole range of feelings and fleeting personae in his role of the despised Krogstadt,” Borak described his portrayal as “played with impressive imagination and color.” He further notes, “(Rothenberg) managed to combine the feeling of entitlement of a disgraced person who has paid his debt to society … and a sleazy outsider who has to resort to schemes—basically blackmail—to achieve his goals. his performance was a perfectly disheveled tour de force.”

A Doll’s House is playing through July 31st.

UPDATE (July 26, 2011):
Don Aucoin at The Boston Globe noted that “Rothenberg brings an angry edge to Krogstad’s bitterness; his scenes with Rabe are among the play’s most riveting” and The New York Times‘ Christopher Isherwood raves that Adam “gives an effective, darkly colored performance as a shaggy-haired, dour Nils, willing to poison Nora and Torvald’s marriage even if it means his own destruction.”

Above: Adam as Krogstadt; photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Adam is appearing again at the Massachusetts-based summer festival, this time as Krogstad in the Henrik Ibsen classic, A Doll’s House. Tickets are on sale now.

July 20-31
A Doll’s House

Written by Henrik Ibsen
Translated by Paul Walsh
Directed by Sam Gold
With Adam Rothenberg, Josh Hamilton, Zainab Jah, Matthew Maher, Chris Messina, Lily Rabe, Lili Taylor

Nora Helmer has everything an affluent housewife could want: beautiful children, an adoring husband, a bright future. When a carelessly buried secret rises to the surface, her well-calibrated, though artificial, domestic ideal begins to crumble. Terrified by this new reality, Nora must choose between outward perfection and inner truth. Still bracingly relevant, Ibsen’s masterpiece, in a striking contemporary translation, offers no safer conclusions today than when it stormed stages of 19th-century Europe.

We’ve got a big backlog of Adam photos, videos and press to wade through, so July should be a big Adam month for everybody. Stay tuned.

We at the Apple have been extremely remiss in our Adam news duties. We’ve got a big ol’ pile of Adam business to get to, but, while we sift through it, we’d like to direct any Los Angeles-area fans to his current appearance in the Lanford Wilson classic Burn This, running through the month of April.

March 23 – May 1
Burn This

Written by Lanford Wilson
Directed by Nicholas Martin
Set design by Ralph Funicello
Costume design by Gabriel Berry
Lighting design by Ben Stanton
Sound by Cricket S. Myers
Original music by Peter Golub
Fight direction by Steve Rankin
Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center, Downtown Los Angeles

Anna is a dancer-choreographer who has lost Robbie, her best friend and collaborator, in a tragic accident. Pale is Robbie’s brother, a powder-keg lost in his own way, who arrives at her doorstep in the middle of the night. Pale is dangerous, sexy, raw and demanding, and he interrupts the course of Anna’s existence bringing major changes in her life.

This passionate modern classic, by Pulitzer Prize-winner Lanford Wilson (Talley’s Folly), features original music by Peter Golub, and is directed by Nicholas Martin (Dead End at the Ahmanson, The House of Blue Leaves at the Taper) and features Brooks Ashmanskas (Julie & Julia), Ken Barnett (Puccini for Beginners, The Producers), Zabryna Guevara (Marley & Me, All Good Things) and Adam Rothenberg (Mad Money, The Ex-List).

Burn This, which had its world premiere in CTG/Mark Taper Forum’s 1986-87 season, moved to Broadway in 1987, and helped to ignite the careers of John Malkovich and Joan Allen. Newsweek said of the play, “[It] has a voracious vitality and an almost manic determination to drive right into the highest voltage that life can register.”

Above: Adam Rothenberg in rehearsal; photo by Craig Schwartz.

The world premiere of actress and playwright Heidi Schreck‘s There Are No More Big Secrets features our own Adam Rothenberg and is currently in performance at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.

Here’s the skinny:

Schreck, a Theatre World Award winner for her performance in Circle Mirror Transformation at Playwrights Horizons, authored the play based on her experiences in Russia. Kip Fagan stages the work that opens Nov. 14 and will run through Dec. 12.

The cast features Nadia Alexander, Dagmara Dominczyk (Enchanted April), Gibson Frazier (Telephone, God’s Ear), Christina Kirk (A Lifetime of Burning, Well) and Adam Rothenberg (A Steady Rain, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea).

According to Rattlestick, “Charles and Maxine haven’t heard from Gabe since he fled the country to start a new life in Moscow in the early ’90s. When he returns almost 20 years later with his Russian wife — a journalist seeking asylum in the United States — he seeks refuge and much more in the home of his once dear friends.”

For tickets phone (212) 868-4444 or visit rattlestick.org. The Rattlestick Playwrights Theater is located at 224 Waverly Place (between West 11th and Perry St.

It’s another chance to get up close and personal with our show-biz hero!

But please don’t try to talk to him while he’s performing; apparently, it’s distracting! We learned that the hard way (sorry, Adam)….

The online magazine Encore* has a set of interviews up with Adam and some of the other boys of Vassar’s Powerhouse Theatre series and there’s an Apple mention! Which we love, we love attention for the Apple. We are petty that way, but Adam says, “It was started as a joke by a friend of mine, and he didn’t let me in on the joke for a year. I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve arrived.’” We feel hurt that our sincere offering has been cruelly dismissed as a “joke” and we await an apology.

There’s also some nice stuff in there about Adam’s process in working on his just-closed run in We Are Here, so check it out.

*See Pages 12-13.