Adam Rapp

When Bella Baird an isolated creative writing professor at Yale begins to mentor a brilliant but enigmatic student named Christopher the two form an unexpectedly intense bond. As their lives and the stories they tell about themselves become intertwined in unpredictable ways Bella makes a surprising request of Christopher that neither knows if he can fulfill. Brimming with suspense Rapp's riveting play explores the limits of what one person can ask of another.

Drama / Characters: 2m, 2f / Interior An ailing mother and her teenaged son flee Illinois and a crumbling marriage for the relative calm and safety of a midtown Manhattan hotel. Mom holds tickets to a popular musical about love among bohemians. Her son isn't interested, so Mom takes the kindly cabdriver instead, while the boy entertains a visitor from down the hall, an enigmatic, potentially dangerous young woman. Kindness is a play about the possibility for sympathy in a harsh world and the meaning of mercy in the face of devastating circumstances. Premiered at Playwrights Horizons, New York City in 2008. "Compelling. A well-crafted mini-thriller, which keeps you in suspense until the final blackout." - Joe Dziemianowics, New York Daily News "Rapp has raised some provocative questions about the prickly mother/son relationship he has drawn in such detail."- Marilyn Stasio, Variety "Pungent, vivid...Rapp finds a gentle approach to his characters' physical and emotional pain without turning sentimental. His playful side is on display too." [Four stars] - Diane Snyder, Time Out New York "Adam Rapp can write dense, tense, funny dialogue." - Charles Isherwood, The New York Times "A taut and involving dark comedy. Hilarious and unsettling." - Dan Bacalzo, TheatreMania.com

"It's totally familiar but dreamlike at the same time," observes one American of Amsterdam's notorious Red Light District in this stunning work from Adam Rapp, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Escaping their lives in Manhattan, former college buddies Matt and Davis take off to the Netherlands and find themselves thrown into a bizarre love triangle with a beautiful young prostitute named Christina. But the romance they find in Europe is eventually overshadowed by the truth they discover at home. Written with an unflinching poetic beauty, Red Light Winter is a play of sexual intrigue that explores the myriad and misguided ways we seek to fill the empty spaces inside us.

When Bella Baird, an isolated creative writing professor at Yale, begins to mentor a brilliant, rebellious freshman student, the two form an unexpectedly intense bond. As their lives and the stories they tell about themselves become intertwined in unpredictable ways, Bella makes a surprising request… Filled with tension and brimming with suspense, The Sound Inside explores the limits of what one person can ask of another. Commissioned by Lincoln Center, Adam Rapp's play was first performed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, later transferred to Broadway at Studio 54, and was nominated for six Tony Awards including Best New Play. It received its UK premiere at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, during the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

The Corrections meets We Need to Talk About Kevin in this harrowing multigenerational saga about a family harboring a serial killer in their midst, from the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award finalist playwright Adam Rapp.As late summer 1951 descends on Elmira, New York, Myra Larkin, thirteen, the oldest child of a large Catholic family, meets a young man she believes to be Mickey Mantle. He chats her up at a local diner and gives her a ride home. The matter consumes her until later that night, when a triple homicide occurs just down the street, opening a specter of violence that will haunt the Larkins for half a century.As the siblings leave home and fan across the country, each pursues a shard of the American dream. Myra serves as a prison nurse while raising her son, Ronan. Her middle sisters, Lexy and Fiona, find themselves on opposite sides of class and power. Alec, once an altar boy, is banished from the house and drifts into oblivion. As he becomes an increasingly alienated loner, his mother begins to receive postcards full of ominous portent. What they reveal, and what they require, will shatter a family and lead to devastating reckoning.Through one family's pursuit of the American dream, Wolf at the Table explores our consistent proximity to violence and its effects over time. Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp writes with gorgeous acuity, cutting to the heart of each character as he reveals the devastating reality beneath the veneer of good society.

"The closest thing that the American theater currently has to a David Foster Wallace, Rapp can give you the head rush of sophisticated literary allusion and unreliable narrative trickery la Dostoevsky, and yet talk of Plano, Illinois, and let you know that he knows exactly how it feels...A gripping stunner of a play." --Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune When Bella Baird, an isolated creative writing professor at Yale, begins to mentor a brilliant but enigmatic student, Christopher, the two form an unexpectedly intense bond. As their lives and the stories they tell about themselves become intertwined in unpredictable ways, Bella makes a surprising request of Christopher. Brimming with suspense, Rapp's riveting play explores the limits of what one person can ask of another.

Two young grifters try to strike a deal with the devil during the hottest summer on record. "An ambitious and prodigiously talented writer." Charles Isherwood, Variety "Rapp...shows an exuberant love for the written word... He] tells stories that encase classical themes--class and envy, ambition and alienation--in blunt terms and in modern settings." Jesse McKinley, The New York Times "One of the more daring young stylists working today." David Cote, Time Out

A pinball wizard for the twenty-first century, Wynne Ledbetter is surrounded by despair. His father is wasting away on workman's comp, his mother is a double-shift waitress obsessed with the lives of the saints, and his sister is a dropout junky. But Wynne has a plan. One of only three players in the country to solve the Tang Dynasty computer game, he will travel to the championships in New York City, where the winner pockets a cool million dollars. With this money, he'll put his sister in rehab, pay for his father's operation, and employ his mother in his very own computer repair shop. But he has to get there first. "STONE COLD DEAD SERIOUS...is the work of a playwright who is forging a real voice... Its rendering of the shared language of loved ones illustrates how families can remain intimate even when they are in shards. Its depiction of a working-class America that is unable to dream of anything beyond enduring is as sincerely sad a commentary on our culture as I've seen in recent memory. And its fear for young people is, unfortunately, deeply convincing." Bruce Weber, The New York Times

Dr. Bertram and Sandra Cabot invite longtime friends Dirk and Celeste Von Stofenberg to their beautiful Connecticut Gold Coast home in honor of James the Von Stofenbergs' only son who has recently been released from an esteemed private psychiatric hospital. The feast promises to be delicious but when Sandra enlists Dirk to help her change the course of her life the sky turns a strange color Canadian geese start crashing into the bay window and the fate of the evening tilts toward an inevitable conclusion that promises to change the lives of all who come to the table.

The United States has been attacked. Men are being castrated women enumerated. Ellen has been in hiding for fifty-two days subsisting on very little hoping against hope for her husband to return. As the world around her falls further into senseless chaos she takes an unlikely action one that just might signal a new beginning.

The second volume in this series brings together some of the best new writing from contemporary American playwrights. Each play is introduced by critically acclaimed writers themselves.THE EDGE OF OUR BODIES by Adam Rapp, Introduced by AM Homes, follows a teenage girl Bernadette who has to grow up quickly when she discovers she is pregnant. THE COWARD by Nick Jones, introduced by Marsha Norman, is an absurdist comedy set in 18th century England. Lucidus initiates a pistol duel, but when he finds he'll have to fight the son of the man he challenged, he doesn't want to go through with it. His plot to avoid the duel creates more trouble. THE BOOK OF GRACE by Suzan-Lori Parks, introduced by Oskar Eustis, portrays a dysfunctional American family, where anger and mistrust are symptoms of historical abuse. WHAT ONCE WE FELT by Ann Marie Healy, introduced by Paula Vogel, is set in a mysterious parallel universe, where Macy is the last ever author to be published in print, the system has an underclass named the Tradepack, and a woman can only have a baby if she possesses the right kind of 'scan card'.

The growing phenomenon of showrooming plagues sales managers and small retailers in ever increasing numbers as technology has evolved to create smarter and more empowered consumers. Showrooming refers to the phenomenon of consumers – or potential consumers - browsing products in a retail store, and then ultimately purchasing online at a lower price through another store. In the age of the Internet, the sight of a customer who will visit a store and use their smartphone to scan the barcode, hoping to find the same item at a cheaper price from a different vendor has become commonplace. Through exhaustive research, the authors of this book investigate this exploding trend and offer strategies, tools, and training approaches that can help to transform showrooming customers into in-store sales. Offering retail managers and owners deep insight into how they can stem the loss of resources to showrooming, this book, through a close, systematic examination of showrooming, provides insight and understanding of the value added through customer service and expert salesperson knowledge. Retailers will learn how to implement essential, incremental changes to infuse value in the customer experience and entice significantly improved in-store sales while building core customer relationships and enhancing loyalty.

As winter deepens in Pollard, Illinois, 30-something Francis Falbo is holed up in an attic apartment, recovering from a series of traumas: his mother's death, his beloved wife's desertion, and his once-ascendant rock band's irreconcilable break-up. He hasn't changed out of his bathrobe-"the uniform of a Life in Default"-for nine days. All he has left is his childhood home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants, becoming increasingly entangled in their lives, with results that are by turns disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing.KNOW YOUR BEHOLDER is an uproarious and affecting novel about what we do when our lives have crumbled around us and we must collect the jagged pieces and begin anew. Seldom have our foibles and our efforts to persevere in spite of them been laid bare with such heart and hope.

"Rapp remains a true man of the theater and a potent writer."--"Time Out""To watch "The Hallway Trilogy" by Adam Rapp is to enter an alternate universe . . . a carnival of the desperate, the grotesque, the outrageous."--"The New York Times""I knew in a single sentence that Adam was a writer the world was going to listen to for as long as he felt like writing. . . . Adam writes like nobody else, his fierce poetic power as inescapable as the doom that waits for his characters. The work is bleak and true, his touch that of a master in the making."--Marsha NormanMulti-talented artist and provocateur Adam Rapp shocks and disturbs, weaving themes of love, suffering, and redemption throughout this alarming yet heartening critical examination of societal change. Spanning one hundred years in one Lower East Side tenement hallway, this series of connected plays--"Rose," "Paraffin," and "Nursing"--is a dark and compelling exploration of what binds people together and drives them apart. Packed with searing dialogue and harrowing narratives, "The Hallway Trilogy" "bristles with humor" and "contains some of Rapp's most sensitive and mature writing" ("The New York Times").Adam Rapp is a novelist, filmmaker, and an OBIE Award-winning playwright and director. His plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalist "Red Light Winter," "Nocturne," "Stone Cold Dead Serious," "Finer Noble Gases," "Essential Self-Defense," and more. He is the author of many young adult novels such as "Punkzilla," "The Buffalo Tree," and "Under the Dog," and the writer and director of the film "Winter Passing," starring Zooey Deschanel, Will Ferrell, and Ed Harris.