Profile: Adam Rapp.

Miller, Bruce

Adam Rapp and I are sitting on a porch veranda overlooking the ocean view campus of the O'Neill 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'Neill 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 starred 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, of 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 of a title can be the door of 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 it 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 Playas 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 bread-winner. 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.

Like the character Jerry in Edward Albee's Zoo Story, a character who struggles to connect with others and find a spiritual home, Adam has had to 'go a long way out of the way to come back a short way correctly.' Unlike his brother, for Adam there would be no short and simple road to success, and his unique voice would come at the expense of an incredibly difficult journey. There was a miserable childhood, failure in public school, time spent in reformatory--the Glenwood Illinois School for Boys--and four years at St. John's--a military boarding school that finally turned him around and straightened him out.

Adam regularly and unapologetically uses his own life as source material for both his novels and plays. His first major dramatic success, Nocturne, which was produced at the American Repertory Theatre (ART) in Boston is a case in point. Though not directly biographical--Adam did not accidentally kill a sibling--there is a lonely central character scarred by his past and estranged from his father, who becomes a struggling New York novelist who uses his life as source material. Animals and Plants, also produced at ART, was based on an experience Adam had with his best friend during a blizzard when they were trapped in a hotel in Boone, NC. And his current project, Red Light Winter, was inspired by a trip to Amsterdam with a friend who had been downed by love, and Adam's strategy for curing his buddy.

Adam didn't write his first play until he was 24, however, after seeing his brother in a production of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation. He liked the play and before long he was reading other plays as well. There was Shepard and Mamet. Harold Pinter. Arthur Miller and Irene Fornes. But what Adam really liked when he went to see his brother, was the way the theatre gang hung out after the performance. Unlike the process of writing novels--which he had already discovered was an isolated and solitary business- Adam was attracted to the convivial nature of theatre. "I liked the idea of hanging out with actors. I figured it I wrote a play I could be one of the guys too." So the theatre provided Adam with an opportunity for making the human connections he felt had been missing, and began to provide him with a sense of home--for his writing and for himself. And in a chunk of irony, the brother whose success in theatre drove Adam away from it, was now instrumental in bringing him back.

And now it is Adam's turn. He strongly wants to give back to the theatre that has nurtured him and given him his spiritual and creative home. One way he has begun to do so is by dedicating a good deal of time to finding ways of making sure that young people get to see plays. He makes it a part of any production he is involved with. "How about $13 theatre tickets across the board for kids under 25? Of anyone under 30 pays half their age? We need to do something to cultivate a younger audience. Theatre is too important to be left only to the people who can afford it. We have to find a way to get past the beige overcoat crowd."

So the dramatic irony here is definitely real. The kid who once hated the theatre has now become a major theatrical force and advocate in his own right. And, though his brother, Anthony, continues to be a powerful force on stage (his work in the Broadway production of Rent was highly praised and publicized), Adam, at the age of 36, has become no less respected.

In a brilliant piece of dramatic closure, (though certainly not the last chapter) the kid without a home has finally found a very good one. "Ten years from now I can see myself directing my own work for the stage, or becoming a film director. I know I want to help promote new works. I know I'll still be writing fiction, too." Only time can tell us what the test of that "tangible" Rapp adventure book will hold. But if the next chapters are like the ones already lived, there will be an interesting journey to read about--more than likely as part of his plays or novels.