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World Premiere
Red Light Winter
At
Steppenwolf Merle Reskin Garage Theatre
(Steppenwolf Theatre Website)
1624 North Halsted Street
Chicago, Illinois 60614
312.335.1888
Martha Lavey: Artistic Director
David Hawkanson: Executive Director
By: Adam Rapp
Starring:
Christopher Denham, Lisa Joyce, Gary Wilmes
Director: Adam Rapp
Assistant to the Director: Joanie Schultz
Scenic Design: Todd Rosenthal
Scenic Artists: Scott Gerwitz (CHARGE), Julie Ruscitti
Lighting Design: Keith Parham
Costume Design: Michelle Tesdall
Wardrobe Running: Angie Canneran
Sound Design: Andre Pluess & Ben Sussman
Sound Engineer: Jeff Amos
Song Arrangement: Dawn Landes
Stage Manager: Kerry Epstein
Stage Management Intern: Hillary Martin
Public Relations: William Nedved
Public Relations Associate: Jay Geneske
Susan Weinrebe
May 28, 2005
Set in the notorious Red Light District of Amsterdam, and the equally notorious confines of New York City, Adam Rapp’s exploration of friendship, identity, and success revolves around a small cast of three characters.
Loosely based on an actual experience with a friend, the story centers on Matt, a gifted young writer, who has hit an impasse in his creativity. He and Davis, former college mates, are traveling together.
As a pair, they are a reverse image of each other. Davis is hard-wired to his own wit. He is brash, offensive, and charming, a chick magnet. Recently successful in identifying a winning book from the slush pile of submissions at his editor’s job, Davis is flush with hyper kinetic confidence that begs for mood suppressing medication.
Matt’s grooming, clothing, and body language mark him as a person in need of all the help he can get. And that is what Davis intends to do: help him by finding a woman to break through Matt’s celibacy of three years. But there’s a twist. Matt has been sans a relationship so long because he has not gotten over his devotion to Sarah, loved and lost to Davis!
What kind of friendship is this? I asked myself this question over and over as Davis made himself seem clever at the expense of Matt. If you had lost the person you loved to a so-called friend, would you go traveling with him? Would you permit him to rampage through the remaining shreds of your dignity with constant put-downs and jibes? I wanted Matt to raise his head, stop fumbling his existence and grow a spine.
Like an Ivy League animal house holdover, Davis pillages his way through his friend’s life. As pitiful as Matt was, however, in his moth-eaten sweater, he had two qualities Davis lacked: talent, and the capacity to care for and about another human being.
And yet, symbiosis at its most unfortunate was at work. Matt permitted himself to be abused and Davis needed a victim. How else to explain the antics that invariably left Davis in the ascendancy and Matt sinking to lower and lower depths?
Enter Christina. Hired by Davis (after first auditioning her himself) for the sexual release she can provide Matt, she carries a valise packed with her own needs. In less time than it takes to say, “Yes!” Matt has fallen for her and she becomes the object of his obsession.
This is an obvious “love” triangle. But what is so tricky about it is who loves whom. I wanted to subtitle the play, Stuck on You and You and You. Matt needs Christina. She needs Davis. Davis needs Matt. And so it goes in a template for dysfunctional relationships based on fantasy.
Intimately sized, the theater’s two sets, angled at 45 degrees, put the actors within feet of the audience. One set, a room in a hostel, the other a minute apartment cluttered with the detritus of life, promoted the sense of being the 4th person in the ménage.
Unsettling for some might be the full nudity and simulated sex acts, not to mention full throttle emotionality. At curtain call, the actors looked as though they had been pole axed! Indeed, the roughness of the material and stunning climax of the play would require Zen-like transcendence not to affect one.
True to Steppenwolf’s tradition of ensemble acting, the cast of Red Light Winter displayed the quick-time exchanges and trust essential for the pace of the play. The physicality of their performances and display of flayed emotions seemed more than playing. But that is the effect good acting produces.
Red Light Winter sketched a complex of relationships and Christopher Denham, Lisa Joyce, and Gary Wilmes, went for broke in their roles. Once again, Steppenwolf Theatre provided its audience with intellectual carryout bags when they left.
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Christopher Denham, Gary Wilmes and Lisa Joyce in Red Light Winter
Photo courtesy of Michael Brosilow
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Lisa Joyce in Red Light Winter, written and directed by Adam Rapp
Photo courtesy of Michael Brosilow
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