WILSON'S FAST-PACED MIND STUFFS HIS PLAYS WITH PEOPLE.(Weekend)

Byline: Jackie Demaline Executive entertainment editor

Lanford Wilson has this friend who lives at Sag Harbor.

Stay with me, because in a looping, loopy kind of way, this has a lot to do with how the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright came to write "Burn This," the Broadway hit that Capital Repertory Company opens Saturday at the Market Street Theater in Albany.

Wilson took a moment away from a recent phone interview to greet the exterminator. At least he claimed to be the exterminator. ("Yeah, sure he is, he's about 5-10, has dark hair ..." Wilson jokingly suspected it was something other than the roach population in danger of extermination while I dutifully took down the description, should the police need a lead in the violent death of our greatest contemporary playwright.)

But back to Sag Harbor.

Wilson would catch a ride out with his friend, a swell fellow but "the man does not shut up. He finds his life so fascinating. God, I wish I found my life so fascinating."

Wilson had already had the idea for a play like "Burn This" swimming around in his head - a jazzy, urban fugue about tangled, neurotic, confused, detached, …