Rapp on Rapp

This week the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed Adam Rapp in anticipation of our Bay Area premiere of Red Light Winter. You can read it at SFGate.com. It's an interesting and honest look into Rapp's process. We were inspired and looked up other Rapp interviews. Here are some of the most elucidating quotes we found.


"I wrote it [Red Light Winter] in 2003. I was on the West Coast, auditioning people for my first film. For some reason I started about the time I spent with a best friend in Amsterdam back in 1997. My friend was very depressed and was having a hard time connecting to the world. He'd lost a girlfriend. In Amsterdam I thought it would be good for him to get back on the horse. So I went window-shopping in the red light district for a woman for him. I met a woman, we slept together, and I gave her more money so I could send my friend to her, too. She was a Greek premed student, purportedly, very beautiful and sweet. He had an amazing time and developed an irrational obsession with her. In LA, I went back to my hotel room and started writing a play about two friends who both sleep with the same prostitute. The play is very much fiction. People want to believe it's directly autobiographical, but I just borrowed the triangle."

Foster, Catherine. A 'Red Light' Rapp on love, sex, friendship. The Boston Globe.
(July 14, 2006).
http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2006/07/14/a_red_light_rapp_on_love_sex_friendship/

"I've lived in this building for 17 years, on 10th between 1st and A. I lived here with my brother downstairs, and then when we had landlord problems we were squatting for a while. And I'm still here. Everything I've ever written, I've done from here. Now it's pretty nice, but I've been here with six roommates, crammed in like an artists' colony, everyone eating everybody's yogurt. I look out this tiny, barred window, and it reminds me that we're all in cages, stacked on one another. So I know those kinds of rooms. And my plays always start from the room, one window and a door."

Shaw, Helen. Adam Rapp. Time Out New York, 678. (October 1, 2008).
http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/40th-anniversary/60791/adam-rapp-interview-with-time-out-new-york

"I always imagine the room that these characters are in, there's usually a door and there's usually a window, and I like to work with weather and I like to work with why people leave. And if they leave they have to have a really good reason. So my first act might be an entire scene in this one room, and that's happened in a lot of my plays. […] When I'm writing for theater I can take my time, and you can use real time and real space and characters can breath and they can really want what's in the other character's pocket and they can really take their time getting there and you can drop story plot points in a way that's framed and takes it's time."

Leeds, Douglas B. (Host). The Playwright. American Theatre Wing: Working in the Theatre.
(December, 2006).
http://americantheatrewing.org/seminars/detail/playwrights_12_06

"[Writing] does take me to a dark place and I get mad at the characters and want them to be better people, less selfish, etc. But I also love them. I care a great deal for Horlick [a character in Ball Peen Hammer] and I resisted his fate in the story. But I feel I'm at my best when my characters are pulling me in complicated directions."

Hogan, John. Apocalypse Now. Graphic Novel Reporter.
http://www.graphicnovelreporter.com/content/apocalypse-now-interview

"I find that more and more I'm trying to entertain myself when I'm working, because I know the work's going to go to a horrible place. … I don't know where the characters are going to go or what's going to happen. I know that something inevitable will happen. I know that they want certain things and they're in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that. More often than not, an entropy creeps in that strangles me, and then the inevitable happens. I don't know if I have the ability to write an ending like My Fair Lady's, when everyone gets what they want after a few minor conflicts. If I tried to write that it would just be false. Or I'd have someone enter with a machine gun."

"There's nothing better than when I'm in the middle of a play. I can't wait to wake up to write. I mean, sex is good and drugs are great, sometimes. But there's nothing better than that kind of ephemeral longing that you feel-that yearning right before you wake up. That I can't wait to get back in that room with those people. That's what I'm addicted to."

Norman, Marsha. Adam Rapp. BOMB, 95. (Spring 2006).
http://www.bombsite.com/issues/95/articles/2819

"Well it's been hard for me to not write, and that's the only process I can speak to I guess, it's so compulsive and I need to do it all the time that sometimes I make myself not do it so I can actually tend to my life. And my life has been in shambles, like my personal relationships, my laundry, paying bills - now I have someone who pays my bills - and it's always been a challenge because it overwhelms me. And just once I start I can go for hours and hours and hours, and sometimes I forget to eat, and the only thing I really break for is to play basketball and to walk around outside and just get some fresh air. A lot of times, days melt away; and when I'm in that zone, I love that it's like going down a rabbit hole that I enjoy. "

Gilboe, Michael. Broadway Bullet Interview: Playwright Adam Rapp. Broadway World.com.
(March 26, 2007).
http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Broadway_Bullet_Interview_Playwright_Adam_Rapp_20070326

"When I started writing, I was a novelist. When I discovered theater - actually, more precisely - what I discovered while writing music was an immediate jolt that accompanied the process, something that takes a novel three-hundred pages to accomplish, whereas music opened up the floodgates. When theater arrived, it was a new attempt to figure out what that form truly is. You can delay an emotion in such a crystallized emotional container and also have a lyric - which tells a story or abstract a feeling. I was drawn to that and how the potential of storytelling can be living in the same organism. […] A lot of my earlier stuff had songs, and I didn't even know why. I wasn't really playing music, but I was drawn to this moment where someone needs to sing something. I always had this instinct to write songs and just didn't know how to do it. Though I am drawn to specific musical genres - indie rock and classic rock, mostly - I've been engaged by the soul-heavy troubadours, the Nick Drakes, the Bill Callahans, and usually do what novelists do, which is write as though I'm recording a song in my bedroom, you know. Tom Waits is such a great storyteller and a major influence. […] Music is the language of yearning that comes out of an animal cry into thought process. It is joy and love and animal tones; animal language."

Bartels, Brian. Shadow Sounds: Music as Character. Fiction Writers Review. (May 18, 2009).
http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/shadow-sounds-music-as-character-an-interview-with-adam-rapp