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

Adam Rapp Biography

Tonight we are thrilled to open the Bay Area Premiere of Adam Rapp's Red Light Winter. Rapp has become one of the major playwrights of our time and his is one of the more interesting journeys to playwriting that we've encountered.

Adam Rapp is a critically acclaimed playwright, theater director, novelist, screenwriter, and film director. He was born to Mary Lee and Douglas Rapp in Chicago. His parents divorced when he was five and he, his sister Anne, and his brother Anthony were raised by their mother in Joilet, Illinois. His brother Anthony was a successful child actor and started making more money than his mother, a prison nurse. Thus, when Anthony got into shows outside of Illinois the entire family would have to join him. Adam Rapp found himself repeatedly uprooted from his friends and the life he wanted to have. Resentful of theater and his brother, he finally was allowed to stay in Illinois with his father and stepmother. He became delinquent and they sent him to reform school. From there he went to a military high school and finally turned himself around. He went to college on a basketball scholarship and there found himself in a poetry class. He quickly changed his major to fiction writing and, when he graduated, moved to New York City to pursue a writing career.

His first published work was Missing the Piano, a young adult novel in 1994. It was well received and won multiple awards from the American Library Association. Since then he has written six other young adult novels (The Buffalo Tree, The Copper Elephant, Little Chicago, 33 Snowfish, Under the Wolf, Under the Dog and Punkzilla). One, The Buffalo Tree, created some controversy in 2005 when a Pennsylvania school board banned it from their curriculum. Adam Rapp has also written the graphic novel Ball Peen Hammer and the adult novel The Year of Endless Sorrows.

Despite their earlier sibling animosity, Adam Rapp read his early short stories to his younger brother, Anthony, and they became close as adults, eventually sharing an apartment in New York. Despite his grudge towards theater, Rapp went to see his brother in John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation. Previously he had thought of theater as solely light musical comedies, Six Degrees of Separation was the first time he experienced theater as something that could be moving. He began reading plays voraciously and was further inspired by such playwrights as Samuel Shepard, David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Anton Chekhov, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, Naomi Wallace, Sarah Kane, Richard Nelson and Irene Fornes. He started to play with the form and an early play caught the eye of Marsha Norman, co-director of Juliard's playwriting program. She encouraged Adam Rapp to join them in their prestigious two year playwriting fellowship.

After the fellowship Adam Rapp wrote a number of plays that didn't get produced. He became once again disillusioned with theater and quickly ran out of money. Right before he gave up on theater, his play Nocturne got picked up at A.R.T. in Cambridge and with critical acclaim soon was produced off-Broadway. He soon had a suite residency with Mabou Mines in 2000 and won the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights.

For the next five years he continued to find success off-Broadway and in 2005 he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his play Red Light Winter. First produced at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, Red Light Winter was a fantastic success and was awarded the 2005 Joseph Jefferson Award for New Work. It subsequently had an Obie Award winning run with Adam Rapp directing. Rapp's other plays include Netherbones, Ghosts in the Cottonwood, Trueblinka, Blackfrost, Night of the Whitefish, Finer Noble Gasses, Faster, Dreams of the Salthorse, Animals and Plants, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Train Story, Gompers, Members Only, Essential Self Defense, American Silgo, Blackbird, Bingo with The Indians, The Metal Children, Kindness and Classic Kitchen Timer. He is currently the resident playwright for Edge Theater Company in New York.

Since Red Light Winter Adam Rapp has continued to direct many of his plays as well as some works by other authors. He directed his first feature film, Winter Passing, in 2005. He both directed and adapted his next film, Blackbird, from his earlier play of the same name. He also worked in television as a creative consultant for a season of The L Word. When not working, Rapp is an avid outdoor basketball player and musician. Once a member of the band Bottomside, he now plays guitar and sings with Less the Band, a band consisting of cast members from Rapp's play Finer Noble Gasses.

Much of Adam Rapp's work uses his own difficult life as a starting place. His plays and novels are known for their gritty and stark realism. His protagonists are generally in their twenties or thirties and he values bringing in audiences of that generation. There is a perpetual sense that his characters are waiting for inevitable tragedy, and yet he finds comedy in the harsh and painful worlds he creates. Adam Rapp is one of our great contemporary young playwrights and is well set to continue to make an impact on the theater scene for years to come.


Photo Credits and Further Reading:

Answers.com profile of Adam Rapp: http://www.answers.com/topic/adam-rapp-children-s-author

The Free Library's Profile of Adam Rapp: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Profile: Adam Rapp.-a0126556707
Biblio.com's Biography: http://www.biblio.com/author_biographies/2045398/Adam_Rapp.html

The Vineyard Theatre's Interview Adam Rapp: Vineyard Theatre. http://www.vineyardtheatre.org/interview-metalchildren.htm

Associated Press article on the School Board banning The Buffalo Tree: http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=15137

A New York Press Article on Less the Band: http://www.nypress.com/article-19130-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it.html

Top photo from Theatremania's article on Red Light Winter: http://www.theatermania.com/new-york/news/05-2005/all-over-the-map_6030.html

Bottom photo Time Out New York's interview with Adam Rapp: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/40th-anniversary/60791/adam-rapp-interview-with-time-out-new-york