Red Light Winter in Wellfleet; Romeo and Juliet in Williamstown
By CAROLYN CLAY | August 9, 2006
RED LIGHT WINTER: Back to the drawing board for a heart. |
An unrequited-love triangle is at the center of Adam Rapp’s riveting and abrasive if not entirely plausible Red Light Winter (at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater through August 12). The graphic story of a sexual encounter between two former college roommates and a beautiful whore they share on a toot through Amsterdam’s red-light district, the play, which recently concluded a five-month Off Broadway run, was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. In romantic terms it’s closer to Neil LaBute than to Romeo and Juliet, but it shares with Shakespeare’s tragedy some Olympics-worthy linguistic gymnastics, most flipping off the tongue of the play’s least likable character, a charismatic dickhead named Davis. Davis is both the play’s hurricane force and its biggest problem. He shops the windows of the red-light district and brings home the benign and beauteous Christina for friend Matt, who hasn’t been with a woman for three years (since Davis stole his girlfriend). Introverted “emerging” playwright and intellectual nerd Matt falls hard for Christina, who shows him not only a good time but also kindness. Less believably, she falls for lying humiliation champ Davis, who sampled the wares before bringing them home. The second act finds her showing up a year later in New York, where the daisy chain of obsession leads to heartbreak and a chilling if deserved come-uppance.
I think of Rapp, the author of the elegant Nocturne as well as Stone Cold Dead Serious, Finer Noble Gasses, and a half-dozen other plays, as the Midwestern Martin McDonagh. Like his South London counterpart, who marries Synge’s Wild-Western-Ireland lilt to contemporary cruelty as blackly hilarious as that of The Playboy of the Western World, Rapp is prolific and very talented. His writing bristles. But he spews plays (also novels and a movie, Winter Passing, which he directed) without bothering to hone them. This one was inspired by an incident in the playwright’s own life that he sends spinning down dual tracks of sexual obsession (and a not entirely buyable numbness on the part of the love objects) toward an eerily affecting crash. But he doesn’t supply the apparently magnetic Davis, who flies under Christina’s barriers and bullshit detector, with any redeeming quality that might account for Matt’s tolerance or Christina’s attraction. The idea is that for both Matt and Christina, the obsession is triggered not by the particular other but by a need to fill a hole in the self. Even the isolated Matt and certainly the sophisticated Christina, however, could find a less toxic plug than Davis. As energetically rendered at WHAT by larger-than-life newcomer Todd Gebhart, he does wield a corrosive wit and a flashy way with words. Yet his only antidote to outright meanness is a little frisky ADD. He’s like a big, outwardly friendly, very dangerous and obnoxious dog.
Related:
New + old classics, Material girls, Tongue untied, More 
- New + old classics
As if freshly presenting stage classics isn’t challenging enough, new adaptations are in the lineups this fall at two companies, Trinity Repertory Company and the Gamm.
- Material girls
The usually evenhanded if impassioned David Hare in The Secret Rapture , a 20-year-old play being urgently, elegiacally revived by Trinity Repertory Company.
- Tongue untied
Robert Frost, loving his little rhymes, once compared writing free verse to playing tennis without a net. Playwright David Hirson might very well enjoy swinging a racket in shackles, considering the fun he’s had composing La Bête entirely in rhymed couplets.
- Road trip
Maybe it was by unabashedly embracing the bad that The Poorly-Written Play Festival , a one-act by prolific and multiple award-winning local playwright Carolyn Gage, has made it to Off-Off Broadway.
- Wallowing
Playwright Deborah Brevoort looked at the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, shook her head, and reduced the tragedy to its effect on one family and one town in The Women of Lockerbie , being staged by Roger Williams University Theatre (through November 22).
- Play’s the thing
On the high-tragedy chessboard of Hamlet , the title characters are pawns, but in Tom Stoppard’s spooky, hilarious, and ingenious Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead , they are, existentially, the stars.
- Don ho!
In 1665, when it made a brief appearance before being suppressed for a couple of hundred years, Molière’s Don Juan was a “machine play.”
- Passion by proxy
Via Dolorosa, British playwright David Hare’s eloquently reported account of his 1997 fact-finding mission to Israel and the Palestinian territories, is not up to the minute. But that’s hardly the point.
- Wilson’s legacy
He is missed. And he is mourned. Although playwright August Wilson, who passed away last October, will no longer be in his customary spot in the Huntington Theatre Company rehearsal hall, his presence pervades the preparation of Radio Golf .
- Killing time
Every once in a while a playwright comes along with a distinct point of view and a voice that can’t be ignored.
- Just a gigolo
Two guys on Berkshire stages are trying to parlay sexual prowess into deep pockets this week.
- Less
Topics:
Theater
, Entertainment, Pulitzer Prize Committee, Performing Arts, More
, Entertainment, Pulitzer Prize Committee, Performing Arts, William Shakespeare, Sean Penn, Theater, Theatrical Plays, Blessed Virgin Mary, Lisa Birnbaum, Martin McDonagh, Less
