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Intriguing Love Song hums two tunes

Theater

Romance gone wrong

RED LIGHT WINTER: Back to the drawing board for a heart.

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.