STAGE WEST: OnWord Theatre's "Red Light Winter"

Jamaelya Hines and Geoffrey Ulysses Geissinger in "Red Light Winter."  Bernadette Johnson / Narrative Photography

            OnWord Theatre’s season-opening production of Adam Rapp’s “Red Light Winter” is courageously performed and uncompromisingly directed.
            If only it were a better play.
            I pay no attention to who or what won or was nominated for Pulitzer Prizes, so I’ll put aside the fact that Rapp’s autobiographically inspired piece was a finalist in 2006. (No award for drama was ultimately given that year.) Taken purely on its own narrative integrity, “Red Light Winter” is provocative in the rawest sense (that’s fine) and dialogue rich (the same), but it’s also misogynistic, muddled and rife with incongruities.
            Rapp himself has called the play based on his own experience – and a friend’s – in Amsterdam in which they enlisted one of that city’s notorious window prostitutes in what turns out to be a game of sex-for-hire and one-upmanship. In the play’s second act, which takes place a year later in New York, the doings are darker, stranger and more brutal.
            The players are two versions of the Rapp of 20 years ago himself – Matt, an awkward, perpetual-graduate-student sort who lives in an internal eddy of swirling self-consciousness, a struggling playwright who regards Henry Miller with awe and his own sexuality with dread; and Davis, a totally unharried, passive-aggressive hedonist who seemingly knows no moral bounds. That these two were ever buddies at Ivy League Brown (for where else would literary types matriculate?) and roommates abroad is just one stretch of belief in “Red Light Winter.”
            Christina, the prostitute who Davis brings “home” to the long-celibate Matt (a lark, a ruse, or a compensation for having married the woman who’d broken up with his pal three years before?), is initially a type and a trope. Eventually she is revealed as a more layered and human character, and honestly the only sympathetic one in the play.
            Director Marti Gobel, a co-founder of the fledgling OnWord Theatre (with Danielle Bunch and Jamaelya Hines, who is touching and restrained playing Christina here), has championed “Red Light Winter” for its audacity and shock value. There is some nudity and simulated sex, which if not staged in the little Light Box Theater in Liberty Station with the audience quite close would not be all that audacious and shocking. Rather, it’s the undercurrent of despair, delusion and cruelty (the latter from the Davis character) that is most unsettling about this play. Sex is demystified and degraded, friendship polluted. No conscience, unselfishness or better angels here.
            The whys nag. Why, really, is Matt “attempting” to hang himself at the start of the tale? Why did Christina really turn to prostitution in Amsterdam’s Red Light District? Why did a 15-second snippet of sex with her transform Matt into a scary obsessive? Why is Davis so g-damned bad?
            Why don’t any of these three recognize each other upon meeting again in Act 2? It’d only been a year. I’ll take a stab at Rapp’s thinking here – their interactions in Amsterdam were so empty and, at least in Davis’ and Christina’s cases, piled upon so many other empty interactions that no face or memory could stand out.
            But with all this left to one’s speculation and confusion, how is it possible to give a damn about Matt or Christina? We’ll leave Davis out.
            The hooker who is more than meets the eye is a tired dramatic chestnut, and Rapp doesn’t do anything especially intrepid with it here. Matt’s a mess, let’s tell it like it is. Davis is one of many Davises in the world of the supremely self-involved, self-indulgent.
            Here’s the strength of OnWord’s production of a play that to me is so problematic: we can’t look away.
            Gobel’s direction allows events, such as they are, to play out at a slow boil. There’s no race to climaxes, of any kind, and she and her actors know how to utilize and effect silences amid all of Rapp’s dervish of words.
            As Matt, Geoffrey Ulysses Geissinger mines the sweetness in a character that is ever on the verge of being swallowed up by panicky self-doubt and practically hallucination. Further, his verbal dexterity with Rapp’s dialogue – and monologue – demonstrate an understanding of Matt that I wish I had.
            Ibraheem Farmer is a newcomer to San Diego stages but has worked with Gobel before in the Midwest. He’s all over the Davis character -- brash and cocky and manipulative as written – and by far the most animated figure onstage. Matt can seem numb, Christina frozen. But Davis? Always in motion, wheels ever turning, the malice lurking.
            Understandably, Hines, like the character she’s playing, is the most vulnerable on the stage. She is poised, and she is somehow credible in a narrative that is not.
            There was an improv class going on down the hall from the Light Box Theater the night I attended. It was ringing with laughter and ebullience. I only heard it during intermission, but it was the sound of another world.
            “Red Light Winter” runs through Jan. 24 at the Light Box Theater in Liberty Station, Point Loma.