Review - Red Light Winter - Unit 102 Actors Company, Toronto

✭✭✭✭✩

by Adam Rapp, directed by Anne Van Leeuwen

Unit 102 Actors Company, The Theatre Machine 376 Dufferin St., Toronto

January 8-23, 2016

Davis: “It’s totally familiar but dreamlike at the same time”

With Adam Rapp’s 2005 play Red Light Winter, the Unit 102 Actors Company has brought a fascinating new American voice to Toronto. The play is an inextricable mixture of tragedy and comedy and, strangely for a play about people in their thirties and younger, it is suffused with an atmosphere of melancholy and loss. While preserving the deliberate elusiveness of certain aspects of the work, director Anne Van Leeuwen leads the cast in a trio of tremendous performances.

As Rapp (who is indeed actor Anthony Rapp’s older brother) reveals in his introduction to the print edition of the play, the most bizarre aspect of the plot is based on an actual incident in the author’s life. Rapp and his best friend were staying in Amsterdam and Rapp decided to cheer up his friend who has not had sex for more than three years by bringing him a prostitute from one of windows of the city’s infamous red light district. In a move Rapp says he has never understood, Rapp’s friend accepted Rapp’s “gift” only on condition that Rapp have sex with her first.

The result of this incident led Rapp to write an semi-autobiographic play about a playwright who writes a semi-autobiographical play on a similar but significantly different situation. We discover this fact only in Act 2 of Red Light Winter, but when we do it gives a metatheatrical twist to what had been purely a naturalistic play. Another twist in relation to Rapp’s biography is that Rapp has split himself into both the sex-starved writer and the best friend with the prostitute.

The play opens in an unsoundproofed room in a hostel in Amsterdam. There Matt (Omar Hady), a writer clearly in some kind of mental distress tries to hang himself. He fails and takes it as if it were just another in a long string of failures. At the very moment of his failure, Davis (Luis Fernandes), Matt’s best friend from college enters and calls in Christina (Chloe Sullivan), a prostitute with a French accent he has just picked up for Matt.

Given that Davis has supposedly gone out of his way by bringing back Christine to help cheer up Matt, it’s easy to understand that Davis is frustrated by Matt’s apparent lack of interest in having sex with Christina. It’s hard to understand, however, why Davis should increasingly ridicule and verbally abuse Matt since doing so does not prod Matt on but only makes him retreat more. Davis

especially makes rude, scatological fun of the fact that Matt is recovering from giardia, which seems almost calculated to turn off both Christina and Matt.

It is Christina who changes the dynamics of the situation when, after a trip to the washroom, she re-enters in new clothes and asks to sing a song she wrote. Matt is entranced while Davis is put off and, seeing this, he has excuse to leave the two together. Once alone, Matt and Christina find that Davis has lied to both of them. Davis had said he had not had sex with Christina, whereas he had done so three times even though it never led him to orgasm. Davis had won Christina’s pity by telling her about his sad life, none of which is true.

If Act 1 is primarily comic, Act 2, set in Matt’s tiny apartment in New York a year after the events of Act 1, is not. Christina, who now calls herself Christine, has come to Matt’s apartment, thinking it is Davis’s and looking for Davis. The unhappy love triangle that gives the play its structure is now clear. Matt is hopelessly in love with Christina but Christina, despite Davis’s abominable behaviour and the fact that he is married, is hopelessly in love with Davis.

The third side of this triangle is the most elusive. In his introduction to the print edition, Rapp claims that the most important aspect of Davis’s character is that he is charming and that Davis is actually also in love with Christina but hides it to protect Matt. This would seem to be one of those cases where the play the playwright has written does not fully correspond to his intentions. From everything Davis says and does, it’s hard find anything remotely resembling charm. Davis was supposedly charming when he was alone with Christina, but is not charming to Matt in Act 1 and he is definitely not charming with Christina in Act 2. The reason why Matt is so depressed is because Davis stole his girlfriend away from him and married her.

There are two men who abuse Christina in the course of the play. One is Christina’s unseen gay French husband who married her so that he can appear straight to his colleagues. The other is Davis. Why would Davis want to have sex with Christina before passing her on to Matt, even though Davis fails in the act, and why would he appear to take such pleasure in the thought of Matt and Christina together? Why, also, would Matt remain “best friends” or “brothers” with someone like Davis who treats him so badly. One answer is that Matt’s illness and depression have left him so passive that it is Davis to is really keeping up the pretence of friendship, not Matt. If Matt really thought Davis was his “best friend” why would he feel so alone that he would try to hang himself?

A second answer is that Davis really does love Matt as a brother, or more, and disses him in the presence of a third person because as a cover. This view explains much of Davis’s behaviour to both Matt and Christina. From how Van Leeuwen has directed the play and from how Hady and Fernandes act it, this seems to be the view they have taken, especially since Van Leeuwen gives Davis more friendly physical contact with Matt than Davis has with Christina.

Yet, Van Leeuwen does not go so far as to make this explicit. In the play Rapp has left Davis’s real feelings for both Matt and Christina unclear. Some people may find this lack of clarity frustrating, but others will find it intriguing and more reflective of real life where we don’t always know why people behave as they do.

One of the key symbols of the play is a snow globe of New York City that Davis has bought and given to Christina. Davis has deliberately sought out a globe that does not have the Twin Towers in it. This marks the play as a post-9/11 play in more ways than one. All three of the characters have troubles with their identity as if something had happened that has knocked a feeling of stability from under them. Christina and Matt are both creative artists, but Christina seems to have no outlet for her creativity

now and Matt suffers from a massive writer’s block. Christina is trying to lose herself by taking on multiple identities, while Matt wants to kill himself because he feels suffocated by the one identity he has. As for Davis, his true identity is unknown even to himself. Only his uncontemplative nature helps him survive.

At the same time that the three have lost a sense of who they are, they have rather desperately filled that emptiness with an illusion. The play seems to show that Christina’s belief in Davis’s love, Matt’s belief in Christina’s and Davis’s belief that he is Matt’s best friend are all false. The tensions that exist in all three between reality and their illusions comes to a breaking point in Act 2 and leads to powerful conclusion.

The performances of all three actors are exemplary. As Matt, Omar Hady creates a poignant portrait of a man on the brink of despair only to be brought back to life by what he thinks is a woman’s love. In Act 2, Rapp has written one of the greatest long speeches in recent American drama where Matt spills out all the feelings he has stored up in the year since he has last seen Christina. Hady delivers this speech magnificently, bringing out all its confusion of love, tenderness, fear, pedantry, exasperation and hopelessness so that we don’t know whether to laugh or cry at sheer volume and chaos of this outpouring. Hady’s performance in this play is one of the greatest I have seen in the past twelve months or longer.

Yet, Luis Fernandes and Chloe Sullivan are not far behind. As Christina, Sullivan cannot be as outwardly expressive as Matt since she is constantly hiding behind a façade. What Sullivan does so well is to show us the frightened woman peering out through the mask of bravery or indifference she has put on. When she changes identities we feel she has really only changed masks since she is too afraid to reveal her true self, if indeed, she even knows any longer who her true self is. Meanwhile, Fernandes, who has made such a specialty of playing unlikeable characters, is right at home as the jeering, egotistical and ultimately brutal Davis. Yet, he still manages to preserve the ambiguity that Rapp has written into the role so that the motivation for Davis’s deliberate obnoxiousness remains hidden.

The play is worth seeing for these three fearless performances alone. Red Light Winter is a forceful, and disturbing play and again we have to thank the Unit 102 Actors Company for daring to stage it and to do so with such emotional impact.

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit http://unit102theatrecompany.com.

2016-01-10

Red Light Winter