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CALGARY - The characters in Adam Rapp's bleak romantic comedy Red Light Winter are looking for love in all the wrong places and people.
Buddies since college, Mat (Mat Glessing) and Davis (Dustin MacDougall), take a holiday in Europe to help them adjust to turning 30.
When the audience meets them in Rogue Theatre's funny, sad and ultimately unsettling production currently running in the Pumphouse's intimate Joyce Doolittle Theatre, Matt and Davis are spending their final night in Amsterdam before jetting back to New York.
Matt, who has been celibate for two years since breaking up with his girlfriend, is too shy to venture out to Amsterdam's red-light district but agrees to let Davis find him a prostitute.
Enter Christina (Lisa Marie DiGiacinto) -- a French songstress who works the red-light district whenever she can't get a cabaret gig.
Matt and Davis represent what Tennessee Williams called the polar opposite males.
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Where Matt is sensitive and intellectual, Davis is pure unbridled animal instinct, and, like every Williams' tragic heroine, Christina becomes infatuated with Davis while Matt loses his heart to her.
Red Light Winter is an exploration of unrequited love and there are hints galore in the way he treats Matt that Davis harbours unacknowledged feelings for his pal.
Rapp's scathingly funny dialogue is given the necessary rapid-fire delivery by Glessing and MacDougall, and director Joe-Norman Shaw directs with confidence, revving up the pace so the evening's 135 minutes speed by.
He handles the sexuality and nudity with frankness and good taste, but he doesn't allow the actors to take the vicious, nasty edges off the dialogue and, in MacDougall's case, physical encounters.