Interview Milwaukee's Youngblood Theater Company promises to do what the others won't

Milwaukee's theater pool got a big splash this summer when a handful of UWM theater grads announced the new Youngblood Theater Company. Promoting itself with style and savvy, Youngblood pulled off three plays in quick succession, including one performed in the back bar of Landmark Lanes. The first offering of its second season is Red Light Winter by Chicago playwright Adam Rapp, which chronicles the tragic complications that unfold in a fleabag hotel in Amsterdam when a lad brings a prostitute home for his depressed buddy. The A.V. Club recently talked with director-playwright Benjamin Wilson, whose original play Godbridge was part of Youngblood's first season, and whose new play, Monster & Mantagora Island, based on Wilson's experiences growing up in Waukesha, will play in March. Wilson directs Red Light Winter, which opens Thursday and runs through Feb. 6 at Alchemist Theater. (This show has been canceled. For out more here.)

The A.V. Club: How does Youngblood define its artistic voice?

Benjamin Wilson: As a company, I think we're letting our choices define it for us. For me personally, I like theater that mines the soul. A lot of us were like, we need to work, we like Milwaukee—let's just make our own until we figure this out. We all have an idea of theater based on acting training; that might result in a different kind of theater than Milwaukee's used to seeing. Also we're younger, and we don't have any idea of what our limitations are, so we can just kind of go nuts. [Red Light Winter] has a lot of strong subject matter that we're forcing ourselves to deal with and challenging ourselves. Adam Rapp has a mindset that I could see not being right for the audience at the Milwaukee Chamber or the Milwaukee Rep. Which gives us license to do it: They won't do it; we can. Why not?

AVC: How did you come to direct this play?

BW: I spend a lot of my money on books, and one of the things I got was a collection of Adam Rapp plays. After the end of the summer season, we were talking about what else we wanted to do, and I said we should really take a look at this play. And everyone who got a hold of it had this intense emotional experience: It was very jarring to them, very scary—very, very intense. And I wanted to try directing, so I thought this would be a really fun challenge, and everybody seemed to get on board.

AVC: How are you handling the emotional intensity that Rapp's plays are famous for?

BW: One day at a time. There was a moment when we were working on one of these more intense pieces and I left going, "What did I just put them through? My gosh!" And they just kind of got up and dusted themselves off. They did the same training I did; they know exactly what they're doing. They're pros at this. We know how to take care of ourselves, and in the process we're able to explore these intense situations—acknowledging that they're scary, that we're intimidated by them, and then pressing on. I think that tragedy in general has this amazing way of getting people through things, you know, letting people empathize with these characters that fail through their own doing; then you can wake up the next morning feeling a bit better. This play is beautiful. It’s dark, it’s dour—but it’s beautiful.

AVC: Sex and nudity are well justified within the story. How are you approaching that charged material?

BW: We're pushing it as far as we can go. I don't know what the end result is going to be yet, but we're not going to shy away from anything this play is giving to us. These scenes are incredibly sexually charged—like, at the end of Act One, it's not really about sex, it's really about this broken man being healed. That's what I'm really interested in, what I find compelling to work on. And every one of the actors feels the same way; we're enjoying that.

AVC: What did Youngblood learn from doing three plays at the same time?

BW: The idea was scary, we had no idea whether we could pull it off, and we came out of it going: "Wow, we did it! This is fantastic! We could keep on doing this." The lesson we learned is that the sky's the limit in what we can do. There's really nothing holding us back.