Listening to the Sound Inside Adam Rapp, playwright

LISTENING TO THE SOUND INSIDE

He’s a playwright, novelist, film and television writer, director, and musician, a polymath who paid his dues bartending and bookselling while trying to make it in theatre. When his play The Sound Inside was tapped for Broadway by producer Jeffrey Richards (producer of The Minutes, Porgy and Bess, The Lifespan of a Fact, Sunday in the Park with George, Wolf Hall Parts One & Two, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, August: Osage County, Spring Awakening, and more Broadway plays and musicals), Rapp could scarcely believe it. He said in a Variety interview that “I had sort of consigned that this wouldn’t happen, like ten years ago. I couldn’t have expected it in a million years, because it’s a very dark, language-driven play about writers, and that’s not necessarily a commercial property. I thought I’d be one of those ‘Oh, he did a lot of off-Broadway work’ writers.’” But Rapp’s Broadway debut drew critical acclaim and six Tony nominations including Best Play.

Born in Chicago in 1968, Adam Rapp grew up relatively poor, living most of his childhood in a small apartment with his divorced mother and two siblings. Although a jock in high school and college (where he was captain of the varsity basketball team), he never felt he fit in with any group. His brother Anthony Rapp (who would eventually originate and continue to play the role of Mark Cohen in Rent) was a child actor who often traveled, uprooting the family when shows would go on tour. Restless, rootless, as a young man Adam Rapp thought he might pursue a professional basketball career—until he took a poetry class in college and discovered that he had a gift for writing. From there, he sought only writing, first in a two-year playwriting fellowship at The Juillliard School, then the O’Neill Playwrights Conference. His play Finer Noble Gases was produced by the Eugene O’Neill Theatre in 2000. By 2006 he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his play Red Light Winter.

A prolific, even driven writer, Adam Rapp confesses to writing 6 to 10 hours a day, and has penned dozens of plays, more than ten novels, numerous television shows including episodes of Showtime’s The L Word, HBO’s In Treatment, Apple TV’s Black Bird, Starz’s Flesh and Bone, and more. He has directed three films including Winter Passing (2005) with Ed Harris, Zoey Deschanel and Will Ferrell and Loitering With Intent (2014) with Ivan Martin, Michael Godere and Marisa Tomei. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award nominations, Rapp’s awards include an Obie, a Jeff (Chicago’s Joseph Jefferson Award), the Edinburgh Festival’s Fringe First Award and the Kennedy Center’s Roger L. Stevens Award.

Including The Sound Inside, Adam Rapp’s plays are often dark, exploring the limits of human behavior when faced with extreme challenges. In a New York Times interview, he said “For me, what makes great theater is when I feel like there’s an undeniable sense of tension, and one of the great engines for tension is dread…I always believe that if you can make an audience feel like something bad is going to happen, they will lean forward and engage more.”