Cutting Loose with Adam Rapp

The playwright (who's also a director, a novelist, a musician

and a basketball jock) has a brash and brooding side

By David Ng

When he’s behaving, Adam Rapp discusses theatre with the stately gravitas of a drama professor. He invokes Harold Pinter, Edward Bond and David Mamet. He uses the phrase “dramaturgically rigorous.” When Rapp decides to cut loose (which is often, once he gets to know you), the conversation takes a decidedly coarser tack. He talks about drugs and booze. He sometimes discusses sex. And, if he’s feeling really mischievous, Rapp will delve into a subject especially dear to his heart, perhaps more dear than the theatre: in a word, scatology.

For Rapp, bodily expulsions have been a lifelong obsession. He’s especially fond of telling about the time he contracted giardiasis, a parasitic infection that causes severe diarrhea. After drinking what he believes was unclean tap water at an East Village restaurant, Rapp began experiencing acute intestinal pains and started losing weight. He dropped 25 pounds in two weeks. He could count all of his ribs.

His doctor prescribed Cipro, an antibiotic that kills most of the bugs in your body, including the good kind. It can also cause psychological side effects, and, on top of the physical problems, Rapp had to contend with a bout of depression.

Related Links: Dark Passages by Jim O'Quinn (American Theatre)

That episode, which Rapp describes as “one of the most unbelievable experiences of my life,” found its way into his play Red Light Winter, which premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2005 and for which Rapp was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2006. The main character, Matt, is a struggling writer who has experienced a case of giardiasis and lived to tell about it. Like Rapp, he is disarmingly candid and has no problems sharing bodily traumas with strangers.

Still boyish at 39, Rapp retains the uninhibited spirit of a kid who hasn’t yet learned to censor his most graphic thoughts. And it should come as little surprise that his writing is equally unguarded. Rapp’s plays blurt rude truths, embrace the obscene and refuse to play nice. They aren’t afraid to let it all hang out. As a body of work, they represent one of the most daring voices to emerge in the American theatre in the past 10 years.

You could justifiably describe Rapp’s plays as adolescent, but you could never call them truly immature. His newest drama Bingo with the Indians (opening this month at the Flea Theater in downtown Manhattan, under the writer’s own direction) offers a serious critique of the state of American theatre and probes the corruptibility of theatre professionals. Set in a motel room, Bingo follows seven members of a small drama company who can’t get their play produced; to fund the show, the artistic director travels to her home town and robs a famous bingo parlor. Amid the violence and nastiness, Rapp inserts a few pranksterish flourishes, including a Yuletide rap that begins, “’Twas the night before Christmas, and all down my pants…”

Rapp’s plays cross-pollinate low-brow styling with high-brow intentions, bringing together the crude and sophisticated, the boneheaded and pointy-headed. The splicing is seldom neat—long stretches of serious drama can suddenly erupt into a dirty joke. A sustained passage of regressive humor can unexpectedly assume tragic dimensions. It’s a kind of theatrical schizophrenia. Rapp puts it in personal terms: “I have to be entertained by what I’m writing, so a lot of my stuff has a goofiness or scatological quality. If these characters can entertain me, then I feel like I can deal with the darker or more serious stuff.”

Rapp’s other new play, American Sligo (running through Oct. 14 at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York City), typically pits two opposing sensibilities against each other. The first is the campy world of pro-wrestling, as embodied by the protagonist, an over-the-hill fighter facing retirement. The other is the domestic rancor that’s tearing the fighter’s extended family apart. Rapp juxtaposes fake physical violence with real emotional violence; the play climaxes when the protagonist fights his final match, which brings on a stroke.

Resistant to easy summary and uncompromising in their bleak worldview, Rapp’s plays are an acquired taste. For much of his career, the writer has existed on the edges of New York’s theatre world, a quirky side dish but never a main course. His plays usually are produced by companies known for experimentation. He has developed a cult following among hipsters and young theatre geeks.

Rapp’s attempts to break out of the 99-seat-house ghetto have been met with perplexity and even downright hostility. When Essential Self-Defense opened at the more mainstream Playwrights Horizons earlier this year, New York Times critic Charles Isherwood wrote, “If you are not interested in human behavior, why write plays?” He went on to describe the play as a “self-conscious exercise in stagy attitudinizing” that could have been composed by a “computer that spends a lot of time posing in funky bars in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.”

More recently, the Roundabout Theatre Company decided to pass on Rapp’s The Metal Children, a play the company had commissioned. The Metal Children tells the story of a depressed writer who’s invited to a small town to participate in a debate about one of his novels. A right-wing Christian faction thinks the book is disturbingly sexual, while another faction supports it. Young women in the town start getting pregnant and then vanishing, followed by the appearance of statues in a cornfield for each girl who disappears. (NYC’s Vineyard Theatre will produce it as a work-in-progress Lab Production this season.)

Professional rejection doesn’t seem to faze Rapp. “It really doesn’t get him down,” says Carolyn Cantor, director of the Edge Theater Company, where Rapp is the resident playwright. “If anything, it motivates him to try even harder.” One way Rapp tries harder is by wearing more hats. He has assumed the role of director not only for Bingo with the Indians but for American Sligo, too, and earlier this year he directed Julian Sheppard’s dark contemporary drama Los Angeles at the Flea. He says he finds this new career fascinating “because it lets me get away from writing, which can be solitary.”

A compulsive multitasker, Rapp also maintains active careers as a novelist and musician. His seventh novel, The Year of Endless Sorrows, was published in January, and he’s just completed another. Rapp currently plays guitar in Less the Band, an alternative-rock group whose members (including Paul Sparks and Ray Rizzo) have acted in Rapp’s plays. As if that weren’t enough, Rapp has found time to direct two films, and he began teaching this fall at the Yale School of Drama.

When he’s not busy with his multifaceted career, Rapp is busy being a dude. Most days, he plays basketball at the 14th Street Y or at courts near his East Village apartment. Physically, he cuts a formidable figure at six-feet-two with a football player’s wide, muscular build. Rapp describes himself as “a jock who discovered he was an artist,” and he partially credits his military academy schooling.

Rapp’s all-American demeanor is rare among the New York literati. He clearly wasn’t born on the island of intelligentsia, but immigrated there. Growing up in a rough part of Joliet, Ill., Rapp says he hung out with the wrong crowd. His father left the family early on, and Rapp’s mother raised him and his brother, Anthony, a successful actor best known for playing Mark in the hit Broadway musical Rent.

In a way, Rapp’s plays represent attempts to reconcile his Midwestern upbringing with his adopted bohemia. He likes to depict awkward young men venturing from the broken American heartland to New York, where they find that true escape isn’t really possible. In Nocturne, a quasi-monologue that starred a then unknown Dallas Roberts at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., in 2000 and later at New York Theatre Workshop, Rapp tells the story of a man who accidentally kills his younger sister. To escape his consuming guilt, he flees Illinois to New York only to be pulled back years later when he learns that his father has testicular cancer. In Stone Cold Dead Serious (ART, 2002), a Midwestern teenager leaves his dysfunctional family to seek glory in an underground samurai sword-fighting contest in the East Village. In the end, the protagonist beheads his girlfriend in the ring and then commits seppuku live on public-access TV. If Rapp is indeed all-American, he writes about both the American dream and the American nightmare.

Rapp sat down with American Theatre on a hot July morning to talk about his life, the theatre and, of course, scatology. At the time, his apartment (where he has lived ever since he moved to the city more than 10 years ago) was being renovated, so he was running back and forth to a friend’s place in Chelsea. Despite being visibly fatigued, Rapp proved engaging, voluble and completely fearless.

DAVID NG: You write plays and novels. You direct and you play in a band. Where do you find the time?
ADAM RAPP: It’s been really hard on my life. I didn’t really realize all of it would come to a head this season. So now I’m working on simplifying and trying to concentrate on things I’m really passionate about.

Do you write fast?
I’m pretty obsessive-compulsive and I’m very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can’t not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won’t eat right. I forget to do my laundry. I have a dog now, and I have to remember to walk him. When I write, that takes over and I can’t do anything else. There’s something exciting about that free fall, but then my life gets really screwed up. I’ve lost lots of relationships because of my having to ignore everything.

Of all of your characters, who is closest to you?
Matt in Red Light Winter, only because I’ve had some serious problems with depression and I’ve had bouts of extreme loneliness like he has. I think Yul from Essential Self-Defense speaks to me, too. But he has a much more articulate way of describing things that upset him.

Speaking of Essential Self-Defense, that was quite a negative review you got in the Times.
You can always count on the New York Times to cut your legs off, so I feel like an underdog now. It’s a good feeling. It makes me hungry to get back in there. It almost reminds me of my earlier years when I was eating ramen noodles, and I was hungry, physically as well as creatively. I have to find a different hunger now. Having a certain amount of success can be a poison to anybody. I’m trying to find my shadow again. That’s one of the reasons I’m doing two plays this fall no matter what they say. I’m gonna put my neck out there again and the risk is exhilarating to me.

What's your opinion of theatre critics as a whole?
I appreciate good criticism and I think it’s really important. I don’t like it when it’s consumer advocacy, like how you should spend your $60. Great criticism is a kind of literature. I’ve written some criticism, and I really enjoy it because I think it’s important for people to know that theatre is vital. Criticism is really unevenly distributed in this town. Obviously the power of the Times is discouraging. It’s killing new plays, demolishing one after another. Charles Isherwood and Ben Brantley have a lot of power. I would like to think that Michael Feingold, Jeremy McCarter and David Cote and people who are really interested in new work would have an equal distribution of power. But we’re so governed by the Times. Everyone is so afraid to talk about it, which is what I hate. Now that I’ve been demolished by them, I’m not going to be afraid to talk about it.

A lot of your plays have socially stunted, awkward protagonists. Are you that way?
I’m less so now because I feel a little more secure in my life. When I came to New York, I was really awkward. I went to military academy for high school so I didn’t have the socialization that most kids do. When I got here I was five years behind everybody. Talking to women was weird for me. I’ve always looked much younger than my age—in the author photo for my first novel I look like I’m 14. I’ve always felt out of place and a little bit out of time. For my first five years in New York, I didn’t talk to that many people. I was working in book publishing and I was around these people from Ivy League schools and I was this dorky, naïve guy from Illinois. But the theatre, where you have to be more articulate, has forced me to open up more. I feel much more comfortable now. I think the band has helped with that.

You had a period when you were taking a lot of drugs.
I’m not afraid to talk about it. I tried heroin for about a week and a half. I didn’t shoot it; I snorted it. I’ve never done cocaine. I won’t do it. When I was in my twenties, I was smoking pot three times a day. I did a lot of acid and mushrooms. I did opium once. After my back surgery last year, I did some painkillers. But I really need to stay away from that stuff because I have a low pulse and I have a dark middle-of-the-night feeling sometimes. Staying away from all that and having an occasional glass of wine is good for me. The family that I’m from is Roman Catholic and very repressed. Most of us have had drug problems, so I think I probably inherited it. Some of my friends remark how clean I am now. I’m better off if I let my work take me on a trip. I never got high and wrote. Never. I can’t even read if I’m high or drunk. Basketball has helped keep me focused.

Why are you so scatologically obsessed?
I’ve always been scatological! When strange things happen to me or my body I always have to tell thousands of people about it. The absurdity is that it only distances you from others. Those things are funny to me. I like it when people fart on stage or go to the bathroom on stage. Everyone’s afraid to put stuff like that on stage, but those are our most private moments, and if we can create a private moment on stage, there’s nothing like it.

In Finer Noble Gases, one of your actors urinates on stage.
Yeah, that was Ray Rizzo, who’s also part of my band. He would drink a lot of water each night before going on, and he would be able to pee on the mark every time. It was pretty amazing. I’ve actually revised that play since it opened. We presented it in Edinburgh last year. I think I finally understood what I was trying to write—I finally cracked the play. I’m trying to get it produced at the Barrow Street Theatre.

Your band has played an important role in your stage work.
I love plays that have musical moments. I’m not a big fan of musicals per se, but I love straight plays that have musical edges to them. I don’t know if I will ever be able to structure a musical, but Finer Noble Gases is as close as I’ve gotten.

Most of your plays bring together lowbrow humor with darker themes.
Where does this aesthetic come from? John Guare told me once that if you can make them laugh, you can punch them really hard in the stomach later. That was a really useful thing when I started. I’m always interested in really dark stuff—I love Edward Bond’s stuff and Sarah Kane’s work.

Now that you've had some success, does Broadway interest you?
I love the big Broadway houses and I like the classic idea of theatre. But I realize that ticket prices are high and my work is dark and weird. I was shocked that the Pulitzer committee named me as a finalist. I was proud of Red Light Winter. I feel like it’s too edgy and salacious in some ways. But there’s definitely a part of me that wants to be on Broadway. I want to be a great writer, and great writers are are produced on Broadway. At the same time I realize that I could never write Proof.

What was writing for the Showtime series "The L Word" like?
It was weird when they approached me, because I’m not a lesbian and I’m not even gay. But they were aggressive about wanting a male writer in the room. I had a great time and learned a lot of things about lesbians, like who’s a top and who’s a bottom and things about the lesbian lifestyle in L.A.—basically how they have the same problems as other couples. I would fly out to L.A. three or four weeks at a time for the writing sessions and then go out to Vancouver for the shoot. I loved it; it was just seven lesbians and me. And they were all great to me.

Do you see yourself moving more toward cinema?
It’s something I’m definitely interested in. I’m working now on a screenplay adaptation of Red Light Winter. But I’m not a fan of introducing cinematic techniques into theatre. A lot of my work deals with people stuck in rooms and not letting people enter or exit too often.

Are you working on a new play?
I’m actually finishing a trilogy of plays. They’re all set in the same decrepit hallway, except they each take place in a different time period. One takes place in the past, one in the present, and one in the future. The middle one takes place during the blackout of 2003. I’d like to perform them in rotation, each one a different night, and then a marathon on certain days. Kind of like The Coast of Utopia. I’m pretty excited. It’s one of the biggest things I’ve ever worked on.

David Ng is a 2006-07 American Theatre Affiliated Writer, supported by a grant from the Jerome Foundation.