Things rarely happen as expected. And sometimes the run of a show is cut short. Youngblood Theatre’s production of Red Light Winter at the Alchemist Theatre was cut a bit short by an act of violence that shook-up things for the veteran fledgling theatre company. Now with things more or less corrected, the exact same cast tackles the exact same script in the exact same space in a run of a gripping contemporary drama that opens in just a couple of weeks.
David Rothrock and Andrew Edwin Voss play a couple of guys who were friends in college. Voss’ character thinks Rothrock’s could use a bit of loosening up, so he hires a beautiful prostitute (played by Tess Cinpinski) to cheer him up. Of course, theres nudity and simulated sex. It gets a bit ugly. There’s also beauty. It’s a bit of a jumble. Other local theatre companies had seen the script (written by Adam Rapp—an Illinois-born playwright perhaps a bit eclipsed by his brother Anthony, who was in the original Broadway cast of RENT) and knew that it would be very difficult to stage. It took a younger theatre company with a dedication to more challenging work to stage it. They opened the show. There was a palpable dramatic energy to the performance. It was staged in a very, very intimate space. It ran for a few performances. And then, due to the hospitalization of Voss, the show;s run had to be cut short.
Youngblood Theatre’s Red Light Winter runs January 19th through February 5th at the Alchemist Theatre in Bay View.
*/?>
