Profile: Adam Rapp

Adam Rapp and I are sitting on a porch veranda overlooking the ocean view campus of the O'Neiil Playwrights' Conference in Waterford Connecticut. This is the same landscape that Eugene might have idled on in his youth when the events that inspired Long Day's Journey into Night were unfolding. Held each summer since 1965 at the Eugene O'Neiil Theatre Center, the conference is dedicated to supporting emerging playwrights by giving them the opportunity to hear their works in progress. During the course of the month long festival, the selected plays will be performed by professional actors in staged readings under the direction of professional directors. The minimal production elements - some light, some sound, and minimal set - allow the playwrights to focus on their play, as the actors, scripts in hand, bring the new works to life. Each play is given two readings before an audience after a four day rehearsal period.

Adam Rapp is one of these "writers in residence" for the summer of 2003. "Last year I was a writer-in-residence for 10 days, when I started Gompers which was commissioned by the Pittsburgh City Theatre. This year, I'm here for the full term, and I've written the first act of Red Light Winter in the two weeks I've been here and am well along on the second," the playwright and novelist tells me when we meet together. Besides the two summers as writer-in-residence, he has workshopped Ghosts in the Cottonwoods, Trueblinka, and Finer Noble Gases in 1996, 1997, and 2001 respectively. It is obvious that Adam is excited by being at the O'Neill again and that he enjoys speaking about it. Once he gets going, his words pour out, barely needing any prompting whatsoever. Catching himself, he admits, "That's the way I write, too. I am sort of obsessive. Compulsive, maybe. Once an idea takes off I can hardly focus on anything else. Sometimes I have to force myself to take a day off - to not think about what I'm working on, to get back with people."

Rapp starts with an image, or a title, or a small piece of dialogue. His recent play, Gompers, for instance, began with a conversation he overheard on a bus ride. "Two young teenage girls were talking on the bus, and this one girl publicly announces that she is pregnant and she is gonna have the baby. These were tough, hard girls, but for a moment they looked really scared." Sometimes it's a title or phrase that pops into his head and won't leave him alone. "An image or a title can be the door or portal to walk through. All I have to do is frame it with an action or two." Adam then lets it gestate for a month or so, and when it's ready, the play just pours out. "The characters take charge. Then, when it's all over, I usually just need to tweak it a bit here and there." The author describes the process "like running down a rabbit hole and seeing what's down there." That's one of the reasons Adam loves coming to the O'Neill. "There are no distractions here if I don't want there to be."

The list of awards and grants Adam has racked up is impressive. He has been the recipient of the Herbert and Patricia Brodkin Scholarship, two Lincoln Center le Comte de Nouy awards, a 2002 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, and the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights. He has also won Boston's Elliot Norton Award for Best New Play as well as Best New Play by the Independent Reviewers of New England. His plays have been given productions all over the world.

Considering the harsh, yet comic grimness and pain that permeates his dramatic work, it is a bit surprising to find out that today Adam is known as much for his fiction writing as for his plays. Adam has written several novels for young adults that focus on a troubled male central character. The Buffalo Tree, for instance, is about a 12 year old who spends hard time in a reform school after being caught stealing hood ornaments. Little Chicago follows the troubled life of a middle-school child trying to recover from sexual molestation. His most recent novel, Under the Wolf, Under the Dog centers on a young man trying to survive his mother's death to cancer and a brother's suicide. Though his subject matter is rough, Adam feels his work speaks to young adults in ways that gentler books fail to do. "Adolescence is filled with uncertainty. Kids are resilient and much smarter about the world than we think."

Adam is proud of the fact that each of the plays and novels he has written offers up something different in content and style. But in each, the voice is clearly his own. Adam also loves language and it come out clearly in his work. "My work always starts with the voice. Sometimes I'll hear someone talking and I'll become obsessed with the voice. Even a single word can set me off. It's the musicality or rhythm that interests me. The language itself constructs the world of the play or novel."

Born in Chicago, the middle of three siblings, and the product of a broken home at five, Adam became a bit player in his younger brother's burgeoning acting career. He was in middle school when younger brother Anthony became the family breadwinner. Adam and older sister Ann were forced to join their mother and their youngest brother on the road. Anthony had become a successful child actor, and Adam's mother, a former prison nurse, had no choice but to uproot the family in order to keep them together. Where Anthony's theatre work took him, so went the family. "I was in eighth grade and I was gonna be the starting point guard for the school basketball team, and just as the season is about to begin, my whole life is just yanked away." Though his brother's theatre career was able to keep the family going, it meant that the basketball-loving Joliet street kid would be pulled from his friends and from the pick-up games that he lived for. This created in Adam one rock sized chip on the shoulder and one burning resentment for theatre.