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citypaper.net EXCLUSIVE: Adam Rapp's dark comedy Red Light Winter is an intense exploration of erotic fixation.
After the violence, success and nudity of last season's spectacular Killer Joe — nominated for seven Barrymore Awards, won two — one might expect the same from Theatre Exile's equally raw Red Light Winter. Adam Rapp's fascinating dark comedy, an intense exploration of erotic fixation, is worlds away from Killer Joe's trailer trash melodrama — and should be an even bigger success.
Matt Pfeiffer plays Matt, a struggling playwright (is there any other kind?) dragged to anything-goes Amsterdam by Davis (the always-watchable Ian Merrill Peakes), his college roommate, now a successful book editor. We meet Matt alone in their seedy hotel room, a belt around his neck: Is he trying auto-erotic asphyxiation, researching a role or committing suicide?
Before we find out, Davis arrives with Christina (lovely Charlotte Ford), a French prostitute, a 150-euro present for Matt, who's still pining for his ex-girlfriend. Rapp slips it in that she left Matt for Davis.
Amidst lots of clever chat about books, plays and words, words, words — they reach for a thesaurus more than once, and we want to, too — layers and lies are gradually revealed. At first, sex is the room's elephant: will Matt bed Christina, as Davis intends, or will his melancholy (as well as Davis' sampling of her wares first) repel him? We find out in a brave, beautifully staged scene.
Act 2 takes us a year later, when the three converge again. Two have been pining for the love they thought they discovered that night, developing obsessions that reality can't satisfy. As Matt says so well (much of Rapp's dialogue is quotable, like a crusty, caffeinated Oscar Wilde, yet through these actors always rings true), they're searching for "the hypotenuse of the love triangle."
Pfeiffer's Matt, a self-professed nerd, is the archetypal nice guy finishing last, likable despite being wrapped in his own misery. Peakes bests his remarkable Iago in the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival's Othello last summer, making Davis both malevolent and magnetic. Ford is a revelation, disguising complexities beneath the convincing veneer (credit costume designer Millie Hiibel's insightful work) of a cheap red light district window prostitute.
Director Joe Canuso's impeccable production navigates Red Light Winter's amusing verbal hijinx — literally high, since much of Act 1's banter is pot-fueled — while revealing the depths of self-delusion and self-destruction that break the laughs with one gut punch after another. See it.
Red Light Winter
Through Nov. 12, Theatre Exile, Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N. American St., 215-922-4462, www.theatreexile.org
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