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Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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The Select Equity Group Series on Playwriting
Christopher Denham (Matt) and Lisa Joyce (Christina) in Adam Rapp’s Red Light Winter, Barrow Street Theatre, New York. Photo: Paul Kolnik.
After you read thousands of plays by young writers, you can pretty much tell in 10 pages whether the playwright is going to get you. The voice is either clear or not, the dramatic sensibility is either there or it isn’t, and the writer either knows or doesn’t know what his personal “content” is, the stuff he will draw on for a lifetime of writing. But it didn’t even take 10 pages with Adam Rapp. When he applied to the playwriting program at Juilliard, which I co-direct with Christopher Durang, 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. The play was called “Ghost in the Cottonwoods,” and began as most of Adam’s plays do, with two characters facing the end of their world, in this case, a mom and son trying to figure out why their house was still sliding down the hill, in spite of the fact that they had tied it to the trees. Mom takes a moment away from worrying about the apocalypse and gives the son some grief about his jeans. They’re too tight, she says. He should change his jeans. The kid says he won’t change them. He says he loves these jeans. And then he says, and this is the sentence that made me fall for Adam Rapp, “I feel like a sex maniac in these jeans.” 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.
