The Corrections meets We Need to Talk About Kevin in this harrowing multigenerational saga about a family harboring a serial killer in their midst in this masterful novel that peers into the dark heart of America (Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day)

As late summer 1951 descends on Elmira, New York, Myra Larkin, thirteen, the oldest child of a large Catholic family, meets a young man she believes to be Mickey Mantle. He chats her up at a local diner and gives her a ride home. The matter consumes her until later that night, when a triple homicide occurs just down the street, opening a specter of violence that will haunt the Larkins for half a century.

As the siblings leave home and fan across the country, each pursues a shard of the American dream. Myra serves as a prison nurse while raising her son, Ronan. Her middle sisters, Lexy and Fiona, find themselves on opposite sides of class and power. Alec, once an altar boy, is banished from the house and drifts into oblivion. As he becomes an increasingly alienated loner, his mother begins to receive postcards full of ominous portent. What they reveal, and what they require, will shatter a family and lead to devastating reckoning.

Through one family's pursuit of the American dream, Wolf at the Table explores our consistent proximity to violence and its effects over time. Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp writes with gorgeous acuity, cutting to the heart of each character as he reveals the devastating reality beneath the veneer of good society.

The closest thing that the American theater currently has to a David Foster Wallace, Rapp can give you the head rush of sophisticated literary allusion and unreliable narrative trickery la Dostoevsky, and yet talk of Plano, Illinois, and let you know that he knows exactly how it feels...A gripping stunner of a play. --Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

When Bella Baird, an isolated creative writing professor at Yale, begins to mentor a brilliant but enigmatic student, Christopher, the two form an unexpectedly intense bond. As their lives and the stories they tell about themselves become intertwined in unpredictable ways, Bella makes a surprising request of Christopher. Brimming with suspense, Rapp's riveting play explores the limits of what one person can ask of another.

When Bella Baird, an isolated creative writing professor at Yale, begins to mentor a brilliant but enigmatic student named Christopher, the two form an unexpectedly intense bond. As their lives and the stories they tell about themselves become intertwined in unpredictable ways, Bella makes a surprising request of Christopher that neither knows if he can fulfill. Brimming with suspense, Rapp's riveting play explores the limits of what one person can ask of another.

From one of the more daring young stylists working today (Time Out New York) comes a novel of New York in the early '90s and one man's brutally funny coming of age.

New York City, the early 1990s: the recession is in full swing and young people are squatting in abandoned buildings in the East Village while the homeless riot in Tompkins Square Park. The Internet is not part of daily life; the term dot-com has yet to be coined; and people's financial bubbles are burst for an entirely different set of reasons. What can all this mean for a young Midwestern man flush with promise, toiling at a thankless, poverty-wage job in corporate America, and hard at work on his first novel about acute knee pain and the end of the world?

With The Year of Endless Sorrows, acclaimed playwright and finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing Adam Rapp brings readers a hilarious picaresque reminiscent of Nick Hornby, Douglas Copeland, and Rick Moody at their best--a chronicle of the joys of love, the horrors of sex, the burden of roommates, and the rude discovery that despite your best efforts, life may not unfold as you had once planned.

A collection of plays from Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp, one of the more daring young stylists working today (Time Out New York)

Adam Rapp's plays have captivated audiences across the country with their unflinching explorations of the good, the bad, and the ugly in America's heartland and cities. Gathered here are three of his works: Faster, in which two young grifters try to strike a deal with the devil during the hottest summer on record; Finer Noble Gases, a lament for a band of arrested thirty-year-olds slouching toward adulthood amid East Village decay; and the Off-Broadway hit Stone Cold Dead Serious. An honest, strange, and humorous look at a blue-collar family struggling to survive in the face of disability and addiction, and the seemingly surreal lengths their teenage son will go to save them from themselves.

Rapp is very gifted, and, even rarer, he has something to say . . . Stone Cold Dead Serious [is] brave, compassionate, and . . . breathtakingly moving. -(New York Times)

A son is pushed beyond his limits by his father who wants him to be a great pianist. Then there is an accident in which his sister is killed. He leaves for New York where he becomes a novelist. Fifteen years later he returns home. 'There's a finality in fact, ' says the narrator of Adam Rapp's grief-laden monologue NOCTURNE, a stunning confrontation with truth that spares neither the character or the audience. The fact, simply stated, is this: 'Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.' So says a young man identified only as the Son, who accidentally decapitates his sibling in an auto accident and then attempts to come to terms with what he has done. This reconciliation forms the heart and soul of NOCTURNE, a startling, unnerving work of art that fiercely pushes the boundaries of theater. The play ... is dense, almost novelistic, in its approach to a personal horror story. NOCTURNE ... is also intensely lyrical, musical in its sounds and in its silences. Make no mistake. Rapp is an original - a distinctive voice unafraid to be too descriptive ... -Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press Rapp uses subtle, sensuous, bold and funny language ... So detailed and poetic is the writing ... that we buy and are powerfully moved by the whole thing. -Donald Lyons, New York Post

In this freakishly funny and vividly imagined absurdist nightmare for our time, the inert occupants of an East Village apartment - members of a band once called Lester's Surprise, now remembered simply as Less - are going numb. Pill-popping Chase and Staples, who look like they've been living on their sofa since the previous spring, sit mesmerized in front of the television until its untimely demise. Desperately in need of technological stimulus, they decide to call up their weird neighbor, luring him upstairs and under Chase's narrative spell so that Staples can steal his Magnavox via the fire escape. The strange arrivals and events that follow move from the hilarious to the disturbingly existential, as Rapp's electronic-age creatures long to feel something, to be part of something, or to be of use. A television blares in the background. A bloody child is carried into the room. And at least three kinds of bodily fluids are spilled. This can mean only one thing: Adam Rapp is back in town. Mr Rapp has always written with the energy and tastefulness of a punk rock band, so it should come as no surprise that his latest, FINER NOBLE GASES, follows the drugged-out members of an East Village rock group who waste away their days in front of the television, their eyes half-open, looking almost comatose. In 2000 Mr Rapp burst on the scene with NOCTURNE, a highly praised monologue about a piano prodigy living in the shadow of the death of his sister. Since then he has written a handful of grimly poetic plays including FASTER, TRUEBLINKA and STONE COLD DEAD SERIOUS - none of which you would probably want to take your grandmother to. The hallmarks of a play by Mr Rapp are slangy, potent dialogue; a dark, often baroque worldview; and a deep wallowing in the gratuitous ... Mr Rapp is aiming for something much more grand and metaphysical than just another mundane tale of arrested development. -Jason Zinoman, The New York Times Rapp has concocted a smelly brew here, but like all poisons it can be intoxicatingly fun to watch other people imbibe the stuff ... -Robert Hofler, Variety

It's totally familiar but dreamlike at the same time, observes one American of Amsterdam's notorious Red Light District in this stunning work from Adam Rapp, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Escaping their lives in Manhattan, former college buddies Matt and Davis take off to the Netherlands and find themselves thrown into a bizarre love triangle with a beautiful young prostitute named Christina. But the romance they find in Europe is eventually overshadowed by the truth they discover at home.

Written with an unflinching poetic beauty, Red Light Winter is a play of sexual intrigue that explores the myriad and misguided ways we seek to fill the empty spaces inside us.

A pinball wizard for the twenty-first century, Wynne Ledbetter is surrounded by despair. His father is wasting away on workman's comp, his mother is a double-shift waitress obsessed with the lives of the saints, and his sister is a dropout junky. But Wynne has a plan. One of only three players in the country to solve the Tang Dynasty computer game, he will travel to the championships in New York City, where the winner pockets a cool million dollars. With this money, he'll put his sister in rehab, pay for his father's operation, and employ his mother in his very own computer repair shop. But he has to get there first.

STONE COLD DEAD SERIOUS...is the work of a playwright who is forging a real voice... Its rendering of the shared language of loved ones illustrates how families can remain intimate even when they are in shards. Its depiction of a working-class America that is unable to dream of anything beyond enduring is as sincerely sad a commentary on our culture as I've seen in recent memory. And its fear for young people is, unfortunately, deeply convincing.
Bruce Weber, The New York Times

In WOLF IN THE RIVER, Adam Rapp explores love and neglect, the challenges of poverty, the dangerous cost of shiftlessness, the simple notion of leaving a place behind, and the value of a girl.

Savage lyricism.
Ben Brantley, The New York Times

A jolt of dark energy...I can't remember the last time I felt as invested in a fictional stage character as I did in Tana... Half the time I wasn't sure what was real and what was fantasy or dream. Yet the story held me from start to finish.
BlogCritics.org

Extraordinary... Nothing like you have ever seen before and nothing you are likely ever to see again.
Theatre Reviews Limited

This is great theater. It's hard to separate the play itself from the creative staging and perfect acting but it all adds up to as stunning a theatrical experience as anyone ever needs to have.
Let's Talk Off-Broadway

It's totally familiar but dreamlike at the same time, observes one American of Amsterdam's notorious Red Light District in the stunning work from Adam Rapp. Escaping their lives in Manhattan, former college buddies Matt and Davis take off to the Netherlands and find themselves thrown into a bizarre love triangle with a beautiful young prostitute named Christina. But the romance they find in Europe is eventually overshadowed by the truth they discover at home. Written with an unflinching poetic beauty, RED LIGHT WINTER is a play of sexual intrigue that explores the myriad and misguided ways we seek to fill the empty spaces inside us.

Riveting...a clever portrait of sexual obsession that never quite shows its hand... With one foot in the buddy comedy of Sideways and another in the macho diabolism of Neil LaBute...for sure, this will be Rapp's deserved breakthrough play...
Chris Jones, Variety

Spellbinding and haunting.
Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times

An arresting study in melancholic triangulation and obsessions dashed... Shrewd about the way certain male friendships exist on the knife edge of disaster.
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

The United States has been attacked. Men are being castrated, women enumerated. Ellen has been in hiding for fifty-two days, subsisting on very little, hoping against hope for her husband to return. As the world around her falls further into senseless chaos, she takes an unlikely action, one that just might signal a new beginning.

Dr. Bertram and Sandra Cabot invite longtime friends Dirk and Celeste Von Stofenberg to their beautiful Connecticut Gold Coast home in honor of James, the Von Stofenbergs' only son, who has recently been released from an esteemed private psychiatric hospital. The feast promises to be delicious, but when Sandra enlists Dirk to help her change the course of her life, the sky turns a strange color, Canadian geese start crashing into the bay window, and the fate of the evening tilts toward an inevitable conclusion that promises to change the lives of all who come to the table.

Drama / Characters: 2m 2f / InteriorAn ailing mother and her teenaged son flee Illinois and a crumbling marriage for the relative calm and safety of a midtown Manhattan hotel. Mom holds tickets to a popular musical about love among bohemians. Her son isn't interested so Mom takes the kindly cabdriver instead while the boy entertains a visitor from down the hall an enigmatic potentially dangerous young woman. Kindness is a play about the possibility for sympathy in a harsh world and the

It's Christmas Eve: a Desert Storm veteran with a herniated disk and a 19-year-old runaway heroin addict share the holiday in a filthy, rundown squat on New York's Canal Street. This unusual love story is grimly compelling, mixing gritty honesty with remarkable generosity and compassion, striking a delicate balance between the sweet and difficult moments in human interaction. ... a terrifically impressive British debut for new U S playwright Adam Rapp. Froggy and Baylis are two wrecked drifters in a New York squat ... BLACKBIRD could, in the hands of a lesser dramatist, be a crude mix of in-your-face grunge and sentimentality ... actually, the squalor here is both appalling and cryingly funny and Rapp has a brilliant ear for talk. -The Independent There is a strange tenderness in Rapp's writing that marks him out as one to watch. Rapp has genuine Gorky-esque talent and loves his characters as all-consumingly as they do each other. -The Guardian

On the night of a terrible storm, a single mother and her younger son await the arrival of the older son, who has broken out of prison. Two others arrive before him: a stranger with a wounded leg and a girl with a suitcase. Nothing will ever be the same. Adam Rapp's play ... is just the ticket - brutal Southern Midwest grotesque, otherworldly and darkly human. It takes place on a stormy night, in a one-room house furnished with scavenged car parts and a PVC-pipe kitchen zoo table; as the play begins, Bean Scully is sucking the leech welts on her naked teen-age son's body. Her other son, Jeff, has busted out of prison and is making his way home, and as the night goes on, various wanderers - a man with a bullet in his leg, a pregnant teen, two half-mute desperadoes - show up and wreak incredible havoc. Rapp's dialogue is beautiful mayhem, full of mudslops and dogsnakes and hog gravy, and we care just enough about these strange souls to be devastated by their pain. Though neither Rapp nor the company nor the audience may ever understand what this work is doing or why, it jolts and haunts all involved in its happy amoralism. -The New Yorker Adam Rapp's GHOSTS IN THE COTTONWOODS ... is without question some of the most raw and intestine twisting theater happening in New York City. -Slant Magazine

A disgruntled East Village theater company with more on their minds than playing Bingo descends upon a small New England town. They plan a heist of the local church's cash box, but the night takes a darkly comic turn as things do not go as planned. The ideas and sometimes the actors ricochet around the stage with such energy and scattershot purpose in Adam Rapp's BINGO WITH THE INDIANS that they might be in a pinball machine. A dark comedy that starts with a sitcom premise and finally invokes questions about the meaning of life, the play spins out of control, but that forgivable chaos comes from a writer who hasn't reined in his overabundance of ideas. The entire play is set in a shabby New England motel where three members of a New York theater group have arrived with a scheme: They'll steal the cash box from the local church bingo (it happens to be Indian night) and use the money to rent a performance space back home ... BINGO WITH THE INDIANS explores themes that run through other Rapp plays (most prominently, RED LIGHT WINTER; most recently, AMERICAN SLIGO): how far people will go to get what they want; how they face desires they barely knew they had; how grief seeps to the surface, and pent-up rage explodes. -Caryn James, The New York Times

Art Crazy Train Sligo (Slee-go), all-star wrestling legend, is about to retire. His two sons, his sister-in-law, his greatest fan, and a few unexpected guests gather on the eve of his final match for his last supper, but things just can't seem to stop going wrong in the Sligo home. ... Adam Rapp's brutal and funny play ... The play's aesthetic - realism with a dash of exaggerated dark humor, detailed observations of the pop-culture world delivered with energy and immediacy - are familiar from Mr Rapp's recent work in many forms. In the last few years alone they have included the play RED LIGHT WINTER, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as a fine small film he wrote and directed, Winter Passing, and a witty coming-of-age novel, Year of Endless Sorrows. AMERICAN SLIGO ... bolsters his reputation as a writer ... as a writer he veers in a few unexpected directions, with new characters popping up, and others revealing surprising layers ... -Caryn James, The New York Times ... AMERICAN SLIGO, his latest attack on the moral values and social conventions that define the American way of life ... Rapp hits his stride in the razor-cut pieces of dialogue ... -Marilyn Stasio, Variety

In ESSENTIAL SELF-DEFENSE, disgruntled misfit Yul Carroll takes a job as an attack dummy in a women's self-defense class and finds himself mysteriously drawn to Sadie, the repressed bookworm mercilessly honing her skills on him. Meanwhile, all's not well on the unassuming Midwestern streets of Bloggs: with local children vanishing at an alarming rate, our hero, his lady friend, and a motley assortment of poets, butchers, and punk librarians preparing to battle the darkness on the edge of town. Adam Rapp is a latter-day Sam Shepard. ESSENTIAL SELF-DEFENSE is an entertaining tale of fear and loathing in midwestern America. -John Lahr, The New Yorker The opening image of Adam Rapp's quirky-glum ESSENTIAL SELF-DEFENSE is wonderfully rich: Social outcast Yul stands center stage in a bright-yellow jumpsuit whose thick, rounded padding makes him look like a ridiculous superhero or a jaundiced Michelin man. Yul works in a self-defense class as the poor sap who takes karate chops from women such as Sadie. When Yul dons the suit, he acquires multiple shifting identities: victim, victimizer, hero, monster. As the ambiguous antihero of a stylized post-September 11 work about love and safety, Yul is a fascinating figure ... Rapp was born to wrestle words to the page and then to the stage; he has a love of language and a zest for his characters' lives. -David Cote, Time Out New York

A religious Southern clan cite God's will as justification for torturing each other. ... There is a certain excitement that one experiences quite quickly when exposed to his plays - it doesn't take long to recognize a truly gifted writer who has an emotionally (and otherwise) quite powerful story to tell ... TRUEBLINKA's title, the kiln and the Teutonic family name are not the only markers of this holocaust drama, writ small. But they are enough to set the dark, creepy, metaphor-heavy story in motion ... This is theater worth staying up for. -Les Gutman, CurtainUp Though the title suggests a meditation on history's worst atrocities, Adam Rapp's TRUEBLINKA is essentially a dysfunctional-American-family play, inflated to apocalyptic proportions. In a dimly lit house somewhere in creepiest flyover country ... It's laudable that Rapp doesn't shy away from difficult subject matter at a time when most new plays risk so little ... -Village Voice