Obsessive-Despondent Disorder
Concordia Graduates Perform Adam Rapp’s at the Mainline
Red Light Winter is the story of two friends, Matt and Davis, who head to Amsterdam and end up in a love triangle with a prostitute, Christina.
Matt is depressed, and following his suicide attempt, Davis arrives at their place in Amsterdam with Christina to cheer him up.
Instead, the love triangle that ensues creates conflict and carries over to Manhattan when they return.
Adam Rapp’s Pulitzer-nominated play is an analysis of the relationship between an obsessed, needy and vulnerable writer and his brash, overconfident friend.
Robert Montcalm, the director of the show, says he’s fascinated by the troubles with modern relationships. His plays often analyze modern love, feelings of entitlement in love, and the insecurity fueling it all.
This production is the second installment in a series of four plays focusing on themes of tainted love and loathing.
Red Light Winter follows After the End, which focuses on a man who kidnaps a woman and brings her to his fallout shelter. The woman, who is his coworker, is told that the man saved her from nuclear fallout. Throughout the play you believe he’s telling the truth, until it becomes clear that he’s actually obsessed with her. The rest of the play relies on suspense built from the question of escape.
“It’s very dark; it’s gritty,” said Montcalm of After the End.
After one of the shows, Montcalm noticed a friend in the audience he hadn’t seen since high school.
“She sat in tears for ten minutes after the show was done.”
Other people get up after their shows, he says. They can be energized by it and able to laugh at the presented situations. But he admits a number of his shows are hard to watch.
“I always try to play in-between comedies and sadness,” Montcalm said. “Because I find there’s a lot of truth that comes out when you’re either going to laugh or you’re going to cry.”
Over the course of the four-part sequence, the storylines and characters, progress from simply harsh character arcs and people that are clearly crazy towards more subtle dramatic twists featuring seemingly normal people.
“A lot of the new-age media stuff that troubles me—it’s kind of a Tinder generation [problem] that you don’t know the people that you’re interacting with sometimes,” he said.
“And even if they seem completely normal on the surface, you really don’t know a person until you know a person—and often then it’s too late.”
A recurring theme in these shows are male characters that seem trustworthy at first, then develop to be darker and more sinister.
Red Light Winter, however, focuses on obsession. For Matt, the writer, Christina is an interesting character.
“He’s driven to fantasies of who she is without knowing her more than one night,” said Montcalm.
“Everyone thinks they know each other well even though they’ve only really interacted for a few hours.”
Red Light Winter is the fifth show for Lifelong Productions, a theatre group made up of current and graduated Concordia theatre students.
Montcalm joined Lifelong with The Pillowman in 2012, a black comedy about a writer accused of being connected to murders because his stories depict violence towards children, written by Martin McDonagh, that Montcalm found from a Facebook post on a Concordia theatre students’ page.
At the Fringe Fest in 2013, they put on Osama the Hero, which follows a student that is tortured to death after writing an essay portraying Osama bin Laden as a hero.Violence, sexuality and being up close and personal are part of the experience for Lifelong. Montcalm is a fight director, so he works to perfect choreography that could put actors at risk—that includes all the sex scenes.
“If the actors feel uncomfortable, the audience is going to feel uncomfortable—for the wrong reasons,” he said.
He prefers fast-paced shows, not intellectual dramas, which means more action and passion.
“I hate boring theatre,” Montcalm said.
All of Lifelong’s shows are restricted to audiences aged 18 and over. The seating is even limited to only 34 people to add to the intimacy.
Chris Jadah plays Davis, the macho guy who picks on his friend Matt and doesn’t really take anything too seriously. Jadah says this play is lighter than the last one and pretty much all the plays they’ve put together at Lifelong.
“He sometimes doesn’t realize the difference between having fun and hurting someone’s feelings,” Jadah said about his character in Red Light Winter.
Apart from his Concordia credentials, Jadah’s bio boasts a one-liner in X-Men: Days of Future Past.
“Don’t go watch the movie for one line,” he tells friends that want to be supportive, but don’t watch the X-Men films.
“It’s funny to go from a show at the Mainline with limited seating, to being on set with Michael Fassbender and Hugh Jackman in a huge budget movie,” Jadah continued.
But he prefers theatre to the one-line “dance, monkey” feel of high budget movies.
“When you’re doing theatre it’s very intimate,” he said.
_Red Light Winter_// Feb. 11 to Feb. 22 // Mainline Theatre (3997 St. Laurent Blvd.) // 8 p.m // $12 for students
