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This production of Red Light Winter approached the play as an act of memory: an attempt by Matt to return to a moment in his past that he has never fully escaped.

The production began where the play ultimately leaves him—in his New York apartment, struggling to finish his own play. Unable to move forward, Matt reaches backward. The events in Amsterdam emerge from this creative and emotional paralysis, as though he must reconstruct what happened between himself, Davis, and Christina in order to understand it, and perhaps finally write his way through it.

At the center of the production was an exploration of the relationship between Matt and Davis: a friendship sustained by affection, competition, dependency, cruelty, and an accumulated history neither man can easily abandon. Extensive backstory work with the actors examined what had bound them together long before Amsterdam, allowing the events of the play to emerge from the deeper patterns of their relationship rather than from the immediate circumstances alone.

Christina’s final departure was conceived as something larger than simply leaving Matt’s apartment. She breaks the fourth wall, stepping beyond the physical and temporal world of the production. Her exit becomes a passage—a crossing that evokes the River Styx—as though she is leaving not simply New York, or Matt, but the world we have shared with her.

Through this framing, Red Light Winter became a play about the instability of memory and the people who remain inside us after they are gone: how we reconstruct the past, how friendship can both sustain and wound us, and how the act of telling a story can become an attempt to give form to what cannot be recovered.

This production featured original music by award-winning composer Fabian Obispo.

From Broadway Play Publishing: “Red Light Winter is a play of sexual intrigue that explores the myriad and misguided ways we seek to fill the empty spaces inside us.”

"Rapp is the real thing – a poet in the grand tradition of 'la vie boheme'."
-Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times

This production of Red Light Winter was presented by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing.