MATT, the love-starved then love-struck hero of the new play "Red Light Winter," is the kind of guy who has somehow skidded through his 20's with all of his adolescent awkwardness rigidly in place.  Sara Krulwich/The New York Times  Christopher Denham, left, Gary Wilmes and Lisa Joyce in "Red Light Winter," a drama by Adam Rapp at the Barrow Street Theater.  When a girl shows up at his door, Matt practically jumps out of his skin. The shoulders hunch forward in a pose of instinctive self-protection. The eyes dart around wildly, fixating on the ceiling or the carpet.  He actually flops to the ground and starts frantically stuffing the soiled debris of his embarrassing life under the bed, and would probably stuff himself under there, too, if he thought he could fit.  As played with nimble physical expressiveness by Christopher Denham, Matt is the tender nerve center of this bleak drama written and directed by Adam Rapp, which opened last night at the Barrow Street Theater in a production from the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. A frank, graphic story of erotic fixation and the havoc it can wreak on sensitive souls, it marks a step forward for Mr. Rapp, whose previous plays have largely been sensational but oddly academic tales of anomie and alienation in America, often told in showy but glib theatrical shorthand on sets featuring television screens blaring QVC, or awash in Count Chocula boxes and McDonald's containers.  "Red Light Winter" comes trimmed in a disappointing array of contrivance and cliché, but Mr. Rapp is here exploring a wider range of human emotion and writing with a new sensitivity to match his natural gift for crackling, hyperarticulate dialogue. In Matt, by far the most richly observed of the play's three characters, he has created a moving portrait of a young man struggling to grasp a lifeline of romantic love that may be his last, best hope for emotional salvation. Matt's doomed yearning strikes a note of pathos that lingers long after the lights have dimmed on the play's studiously grim ending.  The play is, on one level, a morbidly funny depiction of a poisonous friendship hatched in college, one that has long since outlasted its usefulness for either party, although neither seems aware of this glaring truth. The first act is set in a blandly squalid hotel room in Amsterdam, where Matt and his pal Davis (Gary Wilmes) have come to play at being 21 again, although they've recently hit the wall of the big 3-0 at different speeds.  Matt is still living in permanent squalor back in the East Village, where the second act is set. (Todd Rosenthal's sets are sublimely seamy.) He's a playwright struggling for a break, staring dolefully at the computer screen day and night under sagging bookshelves. "Matt's been emerging for so long methinks he's setting some sort of record," is his friend's fondly malicious description. "He's like the Olympic gold medalist for emerging playwrights."  Davis, played by Mr. Wilmes with a toxic cockiness that positively reeks from the stage, is one of those appalling types who manage to harness the juvenile aggressiveness that was somehow alluring in college to fuel a successful career. He's a newly hot book editor who pulled a best seller from the slush pile.  Their uneasy rapport, expertly delineated in Mr. Rapp's sharply serrated dialogue, is a mixture of brotherly affection, professional competitiveness, sexual rivalry and possibly a hint of homoerotic attraction still lingering from the enforced intimacy of the dorm. Davis is the snickeringly contemptuous older brother. He's made it a point of honor to help Matt end his sexual drought of some three years  instigated, not incidentally, when Davis annexed and then married Matt's girlfriend.  After window-shopping in the city's fabled red-light district, Davis brings back Christina (Lisa Joyce), a French prostitute whose wares he has briefly tasted. The presence of this voluptuous young woman, her welcoming curves both a seduction and a rebuke to Matt's awkward, skinny self, ignites something in him that has long been dormant. A desperate loneliness gives way to sudden, unspoken infatuation as he discovers a new kind of self-torture in the form of old-school unrequited love.
The claustrophobic atmosphere of Adam Rapp's play is suffused with too many stale ideas about the cruel ironies and savage realities of romantic attraction.