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. Adam Rapp, Playwright

Adam Rapp is a very busy guy. He is currently directing a play, writing a novel for adults, and is in post-production on a feature-length motion picture. He also has a book coming out in September, “Under the Wolf, Under the Dog,” intended for young adults. Not too shabby for someone in their mid-thirties.

When I call him, he’s in the middle of editing his movie. “Its alright, I can take a break,” he tells me, and I hear him walk a few paces through a door.

The movie is called Winter Passing, and shooting wrapped in mid-December. “It’s a low budget,” he tells me, “Only 3.25 Mil.” It features Zooey Deschanel, Ed Harris and Will Ferrell. “It’s about a reclusive novelist and his relationship with his daughter, and how they find their way back to each other.”

The New York-based Rapp tells me that he mainly spends his days working on Winter Passing and his evenings and weekends directing his own production of Blackbird, the play currently receiving its Midwest premiere at Profiles Theatre that prompted this feature.

“I’ve always wanted to direct my own work, but early on I kept running into roadblocks. Directors with a lot more experience had better luck than me landing a production,” says Rapp.

Somehow—between movie and play—Rapp has also wedged in a novel, “The Year of Endless Sorrows,” which is, according to Rapp, “early in the editing process at the publishers.” Rapp is careful to explain that this is his first “adult” book, meaning it was not written for the middle school and high school market.

It was as the author of young adult literature that Rapp first made his name. His first novel, “Missing the Piano,” was published in 1994 and immediately won praise from the American Library Association, which dubbed it a 1995 Best Book for Young Adults as well as a 1995 Best Book for Reluctant Readers.

The book received a starred review in the ALA publication, Booklist, and was praised for being a “gritty book that forces us to think about prejudice, friendship, responsibility and love,” a phrase that could be applied to all of Rapp’s works, which all tend to lean towards darkness, dystopia, or dysfunction. “Missing the Piano” was followed by “The Buffalo Tree” (1997), “The Copper Elephant” (2000), “Little Chicago (2002), and “33 Snowfish” (2003).

Interestingly, Rapp came late to writing. Born the middle child in a poor but creative family in Joliet, Illinois, his childhood was disrupted by the success of his older brother, Anthony Rapp of Rent fame. A child actor, Anthony was cast in a Broadway play, The Little Prince and the Aviator, when he was nine years old and soon became the family’s ticket out of  poverty. Not wishing to either turn down this opportunity or break up the family, Adam Rapp’s mother moved the family to New York for the 10-week run of the play.

From there the Rapps adopted a transient lifestyle, traveling to wherever Anthony was performing next—Memphis, Houston, etc. All through this Adam Rapp wanted no part of the theatre or arts world. “I played basketball and baseball and wanted to have a normal life,” Rapp told Ryan McKittrick in a 2001 interview for American Theatre Magazine. “My younger sister attended nine different high schools. I wound up going to a military academy boarding school.”

Rapp attended Clarke College in Dubuque, IA, on a basketball scholarship. His plan was to become a doctor, but one day sophomore year he wandered into a poetry class, needing to fill six credits in his schedule.

“It was a total fluke,” he explains. “I heard music coming from this room. It was a sitar or something like that and I popped my head in and this teacher said, 'Come in,’ and about eight students were steeped in a free writing exercise, and the guy gave me a piece of paper and I started writing. The only rule was that you couldn’t allow your pen to stop. I signed up for the class immediately after that, along with a fiction writing class and a nonfiction writing class. I fell in love with it immediately and haven’t been able to stop since.” He changed his major from pre-med to creative writing.

After college, at the age of 23, he returned to New York City, found a small place in the East Village, and got a job in publishing. When he wasn’t at work, he spent most of his time reading or writing. “I definitely lost myself in literature,” he explained back in 2001. “At that time I didn’t have many friends in the city and didn’t know many people, and I was falling in love with writing. I was reading so much; between reading, writing and playing basketball, my first five years in New York were a blur.”

It was during this time that Rapp finished “Missing the Piano.” Rapp drew on his experiences at St. John’s Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin to write this story of a confused adolescent sent to a military academy.

“I never made a conscious choice to write Young Adult books,” Rapp says. “My protagonists have just been on the younger side. I’m drawn to these characters. I didn’t even know the genre existed when I started writing my first novel. I knew very little about publishing in general. After I moved to New York I got a job in publishing but I had already finished a first draft of 'Missing the Piano,’ when I started to learn about all the different genres. I was actually very naive about it all.”

Rapp’s transition from novelist to playwright was not quite as smooth. He is quite honest about the distaste he had for theatre growing up. He blamed theatre for leading his family through a chaotic, fragmented existence on the road. But, oddly enough, it was theatre that eventually provided him with a sense of home. It was around the time Rapp moved back to New York, and his brother was in the Lincoln Center production of Six Degrees of Separation: “I didn’t know anybody in the city. I used to meet [Anthony] after the show,” Adam explains, “and hang out with the actors.” Rapp adds that he “loved the sense of community” in theatre, and he began writing plays because he believed plays would help him “create a kind of family.”

His first play, Ghost in the Cottonwoods, was produced at the O’Neill Theatre Center in 1997. His second, Trueblinka, was produced the following year, also at the O’Neill. Generally, playwrights struggle a lifetime to reach these heights. But despite his quick success as a playwright, Rapp was not satisfied with his writing.

He was about to give up on theatre when a friend, playwright Marsha Norman, encouraged him to join her class at Juilliard. That class turned into a two-year fellowship that Rapp credits with changing his attitude about theatre in general and playwriting in particular.

As Rapp said in a 2001 interview published in A.R.T.’s program for the production Animals and Plants: “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.”

It was soon after he finished his studies at Juilliard that Rapp wrote Blackbird. As Rapp explained to me in a phone interview, he had been thinking about the themes and conflicts in Blackbird for a while.

“I had wanted to write a very simple, realistic play, a two-hander in one room,” says Rapp. “An old friend of mine was a Gulf War veteran who had very complicated feelings about his time over there. He was living with me at the time, and we had a couple of conversations that really struck a nerve. The woman I was in love with at the time was a recovered heroin addict who had gotten clean. Like me, she was also a transplanted Midwesterner who was somewhat estranged from her parents. It was probably the first time I had drawn characters directly from people in my life”

But he didn’t get his play down on paper until he came to Chicago in the fall of 1999. “I was visiting a local high school (in Harwood Heights) to talk about my second novel (“The Buffalo Tree”),” Rapp notes, adding, “I was staying in this little bed-and-breakfast in Wicker Park on Milwaukee. In the evenings I had nothing to do, so I just starting writing it and it sort of grabbed me by the throat.”

Rapp wrote the first act in one night. The second act took two days. “I always have trouble with the second act,” Rapp jokes.

Actually, Rapp had only written the first of many drafts for this play. But it was a start. He worked on it for a while, planning the whole time to direct the play himself. When Director Lee Breuer at the New York-based Mabou Mines showed interest in the work, Rapp gave up his idea of directing the first production and instead worked side by side with Breuer during rehearsals, rewriting as he went along. Mabou Mines gave the play a short production in a Mabou Mines Festival at P.S. 122 in NYC.

As luck would have it, someone from the edgy, London-based Bush company saw the show and decided to produce it overseas. That production received some great reviews,  including the following noteworthy effusion from The Independent: “...a terrifically impressive British debut for new US 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.”

Blackbird later received its first full American production at the Pittsburgh City Theatre with Mandy Siegfried and Michael Shannon.

The folks at Profiles Theatre first read Blackbird in a collection of Rapp’s plays. (Perhaps because of Rapp’s success as a novelist, he seems to have no trouble getting his plays published. Blackbird, for example, was published before its American premiere.)

Profiles director Joe Jahraus admits that what drew him to the play was the relationship between the two main characters. “I’m drawn to directing plays that deal with relationships. Usually it’s something dark, where the relationships are collapsing or imploding, like Carnal Knowledge or Babylon Gardens. With Blackbird, it was the opposite effect. As the outside world closes in and becomes harsher, the characters’ love actually starts to bloom. I’d never read a play with a reality as harsh as this (drug addiction, impotence, abuse, poverty and incontinence to name a few) juxtaposed with a love story that ultimately becomes so heartfelt and pure.”

Rapp puts it another way: “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."