Adam Rapp

It's Christmas Eve: a Desert Storm veteran with a herniated disk and a 19-year-old runaway heroin addict share the holiday in a filthy, rundown squat on New York's Canal Street. This unusual love story is grimly compelling, mixing gritty honesty with remarkable generosity and compassion, striking a delicate balance between the sweet and difficult moments in human interaction. "... a terrifically impressive British debut for new U S playwright Adam Rapp. Froggy and Baylis are two wrecked drifters in a New York squat ... BLACKBIRD could, in the hands of a lesser dramatist, be a crude mix of in-your-face grunge and sentimentality ... actually, the squalor here is both appalling and cryingly funny and Rapp has a brilliant ear for talk." -The Independent "There is a strange tenderness in Rapp's writing that marks him out as one to watch. Rapp has genuine Gorky-esque talent and loves his characters as all-consumingly as they do each other." -The Guardian

Art "Crazy Train" Sligo (Slee-go), all-star wrestling legend, is about to retire. His two sons, his sister-in-law, his greatest fan, and a few unexpected guests gather on the eve of his final match for his last supper, but things just can't seem to stop going wrong in the Sligo home. "... Adam Rapp's brutal and funny play ... The play's aesthetic - realism with a dash of exaggerated dark humor, detailed observations of the pop-culture world delivered with energy and immediacy - are familiar from Mr Rapp's recent work in many forms. In the last few years alone they have included the play RED LIGHT WINTER, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as a fine small film he wrote and directed, Winter Passing, and a witty coming-of-age novel, Year of Endless Sorrows. AMERICAN SLIGO ... bolsters his reputation as a writer ... as a writer he veers in a few unexpected directions, with new characters popping up, and others revealing surprising layers ..." -Caryn James, The New York Times "... AMERICAN SLIGO, his latest attack on the moral values and social conventions that define the American way of life ... Rapp hits his stride in the razor-cut pieces of dialogue ..." -Marilyn Stasio, Variety

A religious Southern clan cite God's will as justification for torturing each other. "... There is a certain excitement that one experiences quite quickly when exposed to his plays - it doesn't take long to recognize a truly gifted writer who has an emotionally (and otherwise) quite powerful story to tell ... TRUEBLINKA's title, the kiln and the Teutonic family name are not the only markers of this holocaust drama, writ small. But they are enough to set the dark, creepy, metaphor-heavy story in motion ... This is theater worth staying up for." -Les Gutman, CurtainUp "Though the title suggests a meditation on history's worst atrocities, Adam Rapp's TRUEBLINKA is essentially a dysfunctional-American-family play, inflated to apocalyptic proportions. In a dimly lit house somewhere in creepiest flyover country ... It's laudable that Rapp doesn't shy away from difficult subject matter at a time when most new plays risk so little ..." -Village Voice

From "one of the more daring young stylists working today" (Time Out New York) comes a novel of New York in the early '90s and one man's brutally funny coming of age.New York City, the early 1990s: the recession is in full swing and young people are squatting in abandoned buildings in the East Village while the homeless riot in Tompkins Square Park. The Internet is not part of daily life; the term "dot-com" has yet to be coined; and people's financial bubbles are burst for an entirely different set of reasons. What can all this mean for a young Midwestern man flush with promise, toiling at a thankless, poverty-wage job in corporate America, and hard at work on his first novel about acute knee pain and the end of the world? With The Year of Endless Sorrows, acclaimed playwright and finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Adam Rapp brings readers a hilarious picaresque reminiscent of Nick Hornby, Douglas Copeland, and Rick Moody at their best--a chronicle of the joys of love, the horrors of sex, the burden of roommates, and the rude discovery that despite your best efforts, life may not unfold as you had once planned.

Two men are snowbound in a cheap motel room in Boone, North Carolina. On a pick-up errand for their drug dealing boss, ten-year partners Burris and Dantly await the arrival of the enigmatic "Burning Man." Talk of beef jerky, Pocahontas, and the various uses of stick deodorant fill the night, but the men's conversation is interrupted by a series of increasingly mysterious phone calls. Under a comic fa ade of buddies bonding in a blizzard, Rapp examines a friendship threatened by betrayal. "Rough-spoken, raunchy, and sometimes guffawingly funny, award-winning playwright and novelist Adam Rapp's ANIMALS AND PLANTS is very different from his NOCTURNE ... The sheer liveliness of Rapp's dialogue and his multifaceted characters keep his play afloat ... a lurid comic phantasmagoria of life on the underside of Middle America." -Markland Taylor, Variety