cover photo by Steve Freeman
this collection contains three full-length plays:
NOCTURNE
ANIMALS AND PLANTS
BLACKBIRD
NOCTURNE:
"'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
1 M
ANIMALS AND PLANTS:
"Rough-spoken, raunchy, and sometimes
guffawingly funny, award-winning playwright and novelist Adam Rapp's ANIMALS AND
PLANTS is very different from his NOCTURNE...
The sheer liveliness of Rapp's dialogue and his multifaceted characters keep his
play afloat...
...a lurid comic phantasmagoria of life on the underside of Middle
America."
Markland Taylor, Variety
3 M, 2 F
BLACKBIRD:
"...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
1 M, 1 F
PLAYS BY ADAM RAPP
I S B N: 0-88145-202-5, $16.95