Incredibly Warm Winter
Google the phrase "battered women" and you'll find almost 1.6 million webpages devoted to the subject. "Battered best friend" yields eight.
This would provide little comfort to Matt (Christopher Denham), the richest of the characters in Adam Rapp's self-directed Red Light Winter. Act I finds the unkempt Matt, a budding playwright whose mastery of English is both funky and magniloquent, holed up in an Amsterdam hostel. He is suffering: from insomnia, an intestinal disorder, and the humiliating knowledge that Davis (Gary Wilmes), his best friend, stole his girlfriend three years earlier. This ended his sex life and pushed him, in the play's first moment, to try suicide.
Davis is a hotshot wunderkind editor who scores about 247 on a cockiness scale of 10, and, the more you watch him, the more you feel Matt's anguish at being unsuccessful. Even as Matt has jury-rigged a noose out of his belt, Davis has scoured Amsterdam for the right whore-Christina (Lisa Joyce), a young, French-accented blonde-to end Matt's sex drought. After sampling her wares, naturally.
When Davis pins Matt down in a seemingly benign, guys-being-guys wrestling match, there's an undercurrent of fury between them, a low-grade Sam Shepard fever. See how they preen for Christina: Davis notes Matt's childhood stammering, and Matt notes Davis' affinity for masturbatory asphyxiation. Only when Matt cries does Davis display any humanity or sense of boundaries.
Act II occurs in Matt's dank East Village apartment (both sets are smartly conceived by Todd Rosenthal). Christina-actually an aspiring American actress who wed a gay Parisian lawyer-materializes in search of Davis, with whom she's smitten. True to form-and after a groaner of a plot-turn-Davis rapes her in an artfully staged scene that includes, tellingly, a cell phone call to his girlfriend, Matt's ex. Never mind how Davis pours ketchup into Matt's milk or mucks up his play on his laptop. Their friendship is as unfathomable as a battered wife defending her batterer.
The oddly compelling dynamic between Matt and Christina is the great bright hope of Red Light Winter. In the play's most plausible scene-the end of Act I-she enables Matt to rejoin the ranks of the libidinous, even though he ejaculates quickly and falls fast asleep. In Act II, she becomes Matt's obsession: He sleeps in the slinky red dress she wore for their tryst.
It's hard not to view the play as a theatrical blue-plate special: tasty action, mass consumption. For example, in Act I Christina, not yet unmasked by intuitive Matt, asks Davis for his New York address; he subtly gives her Matt's address. This sets up Act II, but how does she reach Matt's door? The building's front door was open, she says. How convenient. How to return Davis to the play? He leaves Matt a phone message while Matt and Christina are reacquainting. Guess who left his cell phone and needs to retrieve it? Which Davis will do, of course, while Matt is out getting food for Christina.
If the realm of believability isn't really Rapp's rap, the play's breathtaking language-an orgasm of slangy, jazz-inflected linguistic riffs, cultural references, hip cadences, and post-ironic snark-is delivered by actors content to limn the substratum of their characters' lives. Denham's performance is especially fine. When Christina asks if Matt wore glasses, the actor's stays deadpan: "I'm not exactly what you'd call the like Lorenzo Lamas of the East Village or whatever, but I'm proud to say that throughout my thirty-one-year reign as King of Nerdville I have miraculously managed to remain opthalmologically unchallenged." Denham knows Matt's Red Light Winter of discontent all too well.