AN INTERVIEW WITH PLAYWRIGHT ADAM RAPP

Adam Rapp is one of this country's most dynamic young playwrights. His plays, including Nocturne, Red Light Winter, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Bingo with the Indians, and Finer Noble Gases, have been developed and produced around the country by such theatres as A.C.T., Steppenwolf, Rattlestick, New York Theatre Workshop and Berkeley Rep. In addition to his work as a playwright, Adam is also a director, filmmaker (Winter Passing), and author of eight Young Adult novels, an occupation he shares with character Tobin Falmouth in The Metal Children.
-Sarah Stern, Associate Artistic Director
THE METAL CHILDREN follows a writer whose novel for young adults is censored in a small town. What inspired the story?

The story was inspired by a similar incident that happened to me a few years ago in which my second novel, The Buffalo Tree, was immediately struck from the curriculum at a high school in Pennsylvania. The novel is about a reform school and the twelve-year-old narrator's modes of survival. There is some violence in the novel as well as rough language, and quotes were read out of context for the school board, which called for an immediate seizure of all copies. Books were literally ripped out of students' hands in the library, in the cafeteria, in the classroom. The students reacted aggressively and started a petition supporting the book and the teacher who brought the book into the curriculum, and that teacher nearly lost his job. The superintendent who allowed the book to be used was forced to resign and the whole thing got really inflamed and caused a bit of a cultural civil war in this small community. I was invited to go there to defend the book and talk about my authorial intentions but unfortunately I couldn't.

It was amazing to me that a book that is ultimately about survival and mercy and friendship was seen as hostile and salacious. I later learned that six of eight members of the school board never even read the novel. 

Part of what also inspired the play, was how this novel that I had written ten years earlier had started to fade from my memory, yet its impact on a community was still potent. I was curious about how the artist and the art have different relationships to each other and to the people who experience it. 

What interests you about the Young Adult genre?

I find that I have a lot to say about adolescence, particularly the early teen years. Being raised by a single mother, I dealt with a lot of uncertainty. For part of fifth grade I struggled through reform school and then spent four years of high school at a military academy. There's so much chaos during those years, with the pressures of puberty, sexual identity, standardized tests, and our high-stakes achievement culture. I am haunted by those years in the Midwest and they have proven to be incredibly fertile for storytelling.

How did you move from those complicated years in the Midwest to becoming a writer in New York?

Toward the end of college, when I told friends and professors that I was going to move to New York to be a writer, most of them said, "Why?" I used to think it was a negative response to the idea of being an artist - the poverty and impracticality of it - but I've come to believe that the lack of support had more to do with the discomfort associated with questioning things. Many of my old friends back in the Midwest have very different lives than I do. They have houses and teenage children and two-car garages and big screen TVs and IRAs, which are arguably all good things, but they chose to follow through on a life that seemed prescribed, or programmed even, and that always terrified me. When I was 22 I had a drastic change in the way I thought about things, which was mostly brought about by reading Don DeLillo and John Updike novels as well as a few important conversations I had with a young professor who was teaching an existential philosophy class that I took my final semester on a whim. It sounds like a cliché, but that spring before I graduated college was a sea of change for me. I felt a desperate need to walk away from the life that I knew in the Midwest and head into the unknown. For me that was New York.

You have directed the world-premiere productions of many of your plays. Do you find that there are particular challenges associated with directing your own work? 

I love directing. I think I actually love it more than the actual writing. Philosophically, I think of it as a continuation of the authoring: my plays get better when I direct them because I'm much more of an audience advocate when I direct my work. I want the audience to be involved with every breath of the play. When I'm simply the playwright in the room, I'm more of a punk and I start screwing around and flirting with the actors. I don't know that there is a situation where I feel more alive than as a director in the rehearsal room. When I first started doing it I was more precious about cutting or changing my lines and I had a tendency to treat my text as if it was that of a dead playwright, but now I see nothing as precious and I enjoy making anything work at all costs. 

Do you write some plays with the sense that you would like to direct them? 

All of them. The ones that scare me are the larger ones, which call for lots of transitions, but I'm getting better at that. I've learned a lot from watching other directors' work, particularly the English director, Mike Bradwell. 

Several of the actors in THE METAL CHILDREN are veterans of your plays, and I know that some of the roles were written with certain actors in mind. What excites you about working with actors in an ongoing way?

I love the idea of working with a repertory of actors. I've recently thought about formalizing a company. There's something exciting about revisiting a company to see what a particular actor is going to do this time around. It's one of the things that makes Steppenwolf so exciting. And the Wooster Group and Richard Maxwell and Elevator Repair Service. This model happens less and less these days but it's one of the things that makes theatre thrilling to me.

Are there particular playwrights who have had an influence on you and your work?

So many. I love Pinter, Guare, Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, Naomi Wallace, Sarah Kane, Richard Nelson, Chekhov.

What's the strangest or most surprising experience you have encountered in response to your work?

I'm always confounded when people assume that everything is autobiographical. That happens a lot to me.