Rapping with RAPP

Playwright and novelist Adam Rapp has quickly become one of the country’s most dynamic young playwrights. His experiments with language captivated audiences last fall in the A.R.T. premiere of Nocturne. This spring, the A.R.T. premieres one of Rapp’s latest plays, Animals and Plants.

Ryan McKittrick: What are your earliest associations with the theatre?

Adam Rapp: I hated the theatre when I was a kid. My brother was a child actor. He appeared on Broadway when he was nine years old in a play called The Little Prince and the Aviator, based on Saint-Exupery’s fable. Out of nowhere, my family moved to New York for ten weeks. After that, he was cast in plays all over the country. My family was uprooted every time he got a new part. We lived in Houston, Memphis, and in hotels all over. I played basketball and baseball and wanted to have a normal life. My younger sister attended nine different high schools. I wound up going to a military academy boarding school. So, my hatred for the theatre stemmed from the way it uprooted my family.

RM: What effect did the military academy have on you as a writer?

AR: It gave me a lot to write about. That controlled, structured environment with inspections, hair cuts, and uniforms can only breed anarchy. St. John’s also taught me about how boys interact with one another, about how boys, whether they want to or not, become men. Almost every male relationship I’ve written about is informed by my experience at the Academy.

RM: After you graduated from St. John’s, how did you begin writing?

AR: I never read in high school. And I wasn’t much of a reader in college. But I started writing when I was about twenty. I took a creative writing course in which we did a stream of consciousness exercise to music. We had to start writing and weren’t allowed to lift our pens for ten minutes. The words just flew out of me. Soon I changed my major from premed to fiction. Then I started reading voraciously, mostly because I was so intrigued by language and, more specifically, by the musicality of language. When I read a poem or a novel, I always see it a kind of musical arrangement.

RM: Given your distaste for the theatre as a child, what made you turn to playwriting as an adult?

AR: I was twenty-three when I moved to New York City. My brother was in a production of Six Degrees of Separation at Lincoln Center, and I didn’t know anybody in the City. I used to meet him after the show and hang out with the actors. I loved the sense of community. I felt the need to create a kind of family, and I thought that writing plays would help me do that. Later, when I was studying playwriting at Juilliard, Marsha Norman, besides teaching me a lot about dramatic structure, really nurtured me, speaking to me the way a mother might speak to her son. So I have deep associations between theatre and family. And that’s why I get annoyed when, as a playwright, I get shut out of the rehearsal process. Luckily, that hasn’t happened at the A.R.T.

RM: How have your childhood experiences of rootlessness informed your writing?

AR: My characters are always trying to find a home. My plays and novels constantly involve people trying to find refuge in chaos. And they’re constantly trying to connect with people who are strangers.

RM: Do you see this struggle in Animals and Plants?

AR: I do. The character Dantly has forgotten his past. There’s a moment when he doesn’t remember if he ever held a baby. Cassandra asks him where he’s from, and he answers that he’s not sure. He’s rootless and suddenly facing an existential crisis. He needs to figure out how to start over. That’s why he walks out of the hotel room at the end, nude. He’s striping away the layers of his self to find a new skin.

RM: So the oblivion Dantly achieves at the end is positive?

AR: In some ways, it’s a start. Some people might read the end as a suicide. But in a spiritual sense, he’s looking to be born again into the world. People could interpret it in different ways.

RM: How does Dantly’s fixation on his own body play into his crisis?

AR: We all become alien to our own bodies. I watched my mom die of cancer. She had things growing out of her forehead and weird tumors all over her body. When she died, she looked like an alien to me. As we age, our bodies begin to disintegrate. Dantly suddenly becomes foreign to his own body. He begins to see his body as a mere thing.

RM: What inspired you to write Animals and Plants?

AR: I based it, in part, on an experience I had with my best friend. He and I were trapped by a blizzard in a hotel in Boone, NC. We had a funny but intense three days. We questioned our friendship and everything else in our lives. At the time, my friend had shut down emotionally and sexually. His crisis and our friendship were issues I always wanted to explore.

RM: Do you see the influence of any other playwrights in Animals and Plants?

AR: I realized halfway through that I was re-writing The Dumb Waiter in a weird way. Pinter is one of my heroes. I love the way he gets people caught in a room and doesn’t let them leave. I also like the sense of dread in his work. The feeling that something bad is about to happen is compelling on stage.

RM: Animals and Plants has much more suspense than Nocturne, in which the narrator immediately reveals his past to the audience.

AR: With Animals and Plants, I wanted to write a suspense story. I also wanted to write a play with a more Aristotelian structure.

RM: How do you go about writing a play?

AR: I usually come up with a title first. Then I find an environment for my characters. I’m obsessed with putting weather in a window. At the end of Nocturne, there’s snow in the window. In Animals and Plants, the disorienting aspect of the snowstorm parallels Dantly’s own confusion. And I’m always interested in how and when my characters walk through the door. I love it when characters walk in and their hair is full of snow. Or they’re bleeding or they’re soaking wet. Entrances tell a compact story and raise the stakes of the play.

RM: How did you come up with the title, Animals and Plants?

AR: There’s a chalkboard on the fifth floor at Juilliard. For a while, there was a list on the board that read, “The Divine Order of Things: 1. God 2. Angels 3. Humans 4. Animals 5. Plants 6. Rocks.” I circled “Animals” and “Plants” and thought the rhythm of those words was interesting.

RM: Like so many of your characters, Burris, Dantly’s partner in crime, is interested in language, constantly playing with it. How do characters like Burris reflect your own interest in language?

AR: I’m obsessed with language. I’m not a good speller at all. Nor am I grammatically gifted. But I’m always looking at the dictionary. People can’t control their government, taxes, life spans, or whom they date. But we can control how we construct language. It’s a kind of government that we consciously create. People misuse language all the time, but that interests me. I delight in finding new ways of combining words. In Animals and Plants, Dantly has an inferiority complex about language, and Burris thinks he knows a lot about language. The opposition reflects my own neurosis about language.

RM: To what extent do these two characters manifest your own split personality?

AR: Both those guys are part of me. Dantly is the sweeter, gentler, more confused part. Burris is the conniving bastard who would steal a bag of money. I think Burris’ disorder, his greed and cruelty, is what kept me up at night while I was writing the play. And Dantly’s existential crisis is what made me love the play.

RM: Why does Burris betray Dantly?

AR: I have a black sheep syndrome. I was the middle of three kids, growing up between my sister, who was an angel, and my brother, who was this little genius. I was always in a lot of trouble. I was always trying to prove my innocence, especially when I had committed the crime. I’m still struggling with issues I was dealing with when I was twelve.

RM: You just published your third novel. Do you plan to continue writing both novels and plays?

AR: There’s a great escape act to novel writing. You never have to face your audience. But I get lonely when I write novels. I need to run out of my cave, and be around people. The playwright sits in the audience, between people. That’s a very intense feeling. I like both feelings: being able to escape to my cave and sitting in the theatre, feeling the heartbeat of the audience.

Ryan McKittrick is a graduate of the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.