Adam Rapp

When Mike's mother and sister go on tour with "Les Miserables," Mike's father and his new wife enroll Mike in St. Matthew's Military Academy where, facing brutality and ignorance, he learns to survive.

A homeless boy, running from the police with a fifteen-year-old, drug-addicted prostitute, her boyfriend who just killed his own parents, and a baby, gets the chance to make a better life for himself.

An eleven-year-old boy tries to cope with being sexually abused, neglected, and treated cruelly at school.

In a world where children under twelve are used as slave labor in subterranean lime mines, eleven-year-old Whensday Bluehouse struggles to survive the continuous poison rains and evade the ruthless Syndicate Soldiers.

While serving a six-month sentence at a juvenile detention center, thirteen-year-old Sura struggles to survive the experience with his spirit intact.

Abducted by teen genius Bounce and her drifter friends Wiggins and Orange, three-year-old Frog seems content to eat cereal and play a video game about wolves all day--a game that parallels the reality around her--until Wiggins is overcome by guilt and tension and takes action.

"In Essential Self-Defense, disgruntled outcast 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 prepare to battle the darkness on the edge of town."--BOOK JACKET.

"Gathered here are three of Adam Rapp's latest works: Faster, in which two young drifters 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. Honest, strange, and humorous, this play looks at a blue-collar family's struggle to survive in the face of disability and addiction, and the seemingly surreal lengths to which their teenage son will go to save them from themselves."--BOOK JACKET.

An 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. --From publisher description.

For a runaway boy who goes by the name "Punkzilla," kicking a meth habit and a life of petty crime in Portland, Oregon, is a prelude to a mission: reconnecting with his older brother, a gay man dying of cancer in Memphis. Against a backdrop of seedy motels, dicey bus stations, and hitched rides, the desperate fourteen-year-old meets a colorful, sometimes dangerous cast of characters. And in letters to his sibling, he catalogs them all—from an abusive stranger and a ghostly girl to a kind transsexual and an old woman with an oozing eye. The language is raw and revealing, crackling with visceral details and dark humor, yet with each interstate exit Punkzilla's journey grows more urgent; will he make it to Tennessee in time? Told in epistolary style, this daring novel offers a narrative worthy of Kerouac and a keen insight into the power of chance encounters.

Sixteen-year-old Steve struggles to make sense of his mother's terminal breast cancer and his brother's suicide.

"As winter deepens in snowbound Pollard, Illinois, thirty-something Francis Falbo is holed up in his attic apartment, recovering from a series of traumas: his mother's death, his beloved wife's desertion, and his once-ascendant rock band's irreconcilable break-up. Francis hasn't shaved in months, hasn't so much as changed out of his bathrobe-"the uniform of a Life in Default"-for nine days. Other than the agoraphobia that continues to hold him hostage, all he has left is his childhood home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants, including a pair of former circus performers whose daughter has gone missing. The tight-knit community has already survived a blizzard, but there is more danger in store for the citizens of Pollard before summer arrives. Francis is himself caught up in these troubles as he becomes increasingly entangled in the affairs of others, with results that are by turns disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing" --

"Rapp remains a true man of the theater and a potent writer."--Time Out "To watch The Hallway Trilogy by Adam Rapp is to enter an alternate universe. a carnival of the desperate, the grotesque, the outrageous."--The New York Times "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. 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."--Marsha Norman Multi-talented artist and provocateur Adam Rapp shocks and disturbs, weaving themes of love, suffering, and redemption throughout this alarming yet heartening critical examination of societal change. Spanning one hundred years in one Lower East Side tenement hallway, this series of connected plays--Rose, Paraffin, and Nursing--is a dark and compelling exploration of what binds people together and drives them apart. Packed with searing dialogue and harrowing narratives, The Hallway Trilogy "bristles with humor" and "contains some of Rapp's most sensitive and mature writing" (The New York Times). Adam Rapp is a novelist, filmmaker, and an OBIE Award-winning playwright and director. His plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalist Red Light Winter, Nocturne, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Finer Noble Gases, Essential Self-Defense, and more. He is the author of many young adult novels such as Punkzilla, The Buffalo Tree, and Under the Dog, and the writer and director of the film Winter Passing, starring Zooey Deschanel, Will Ferrell, and Ed Harris. "--

In this new world, speed and efficiency are everything, and the populace zooms along in a perpetually stimulated haze. Angela thinks she's the only person in her family maybe the only person on the planet who sees anything wrong with this picture. But the truth is she's not alone.