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Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity. Ice congeals in the stomach. Frost spiderwebs in the lungs. The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery.
You have to escape to survive, as you must survive to escape.
You can't run forever. There's only so much pavement that the road makers lay down. After a while, the highway quits going north and it just turns into sky. And you can't go anywhere in the sky unless you have a plane or some kind of rocket.
Man, that’s the only kind of book I like – one that’s so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.
ADAM RAPP, Under the Wolf, Under the Dog
I don’t know where the characters are going to go or what’s going to happen. I know that something inevitable will happen. I know that they want certain things and they’re in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that. More often than not, an entropy creeps in that strangles me, and then the inevitable happens. I don’t know if I have the ability to write an ending like My Fair Lady’s, when everyone gets what they want after a few minor conflicts. If I tried to write that it would just be false. Or I’d have someone enter with a machine gun.
ADAM RAPP, interview, Bomb Magazine, spring 2006
I've been living in Portland for five months and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I probably won't really know for years because that's how it works right? You don't really develop feelings about a place till you've left it. It's like a girl or a dog.
It was like losing an important weight-bearing bone, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to walk the streets without it.
ADAM RAPP, The Year of Endless Sorrows
I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry. I have a dog now, and I have to remember to walk him. When I write, that takes over and I can't do anything else. There's something exciting about that free fall, but then my life gets really screwed up. I've lost lots of relationships because of my having to ignore everything.
ADAM RAPP, interview, Theatre Communications Group
We only have so much time.... Time will kill you – it really will.
ADAM RAPP, Under the Wolf, Under the Dog
Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.
ADAM RAPP, Nocturne: A Play
I find that more and more I’m trying to entertain myself when I’m working, because I know the work’s going to go to a horrible place.
ADAM RAPP, interview, Bomb Magazine, spring 2006
I suffer from and enjoy an incredibly vivid dream life. A lot of times there is a sort-of narrative and other times they are just funhouses of non-linear imagery and other scary stuff.
Well it's been hard for me to not write, and that's the only process I can speak to I guess, it's so compulsive and I need to do it all the time that sometimes I make myself not do it so I can actually tend to my life. And my life has been in shambles, like my personal relationships, my laundry, paying bills--now I have someone who pays my bills--and it's always been a challenge because it overwhelms me. And just once I start I can go for hours and hours and hours, and sometimes I forget to eat, and the only thing I really break for is to play basketball and to walk around outside and just get some fresh air. A lot of times, days melt away; and when I'm in that zone, I love that it's like going down a rabbit hole that I enjoy.
ADAM RAPP, Broadway Bullet interview, Mar. 26, 2007
Video games and films are starting to look more like each other. The graphics are so spellbinding and real. People playing video games are like filmmakers—you can control the dream in your own living room. You create your own destiny; you become your own author.
ADAM RAPP, interview, Bomb Magazine, spring 2006
You can always count on the New York Times to cut your legs off.
ADAM RAPP, interview, Theatre Communications Group
I imagine a soul is a little perfect crystal egg floating in your chest. Somewhere deeper than where they put your heart. Somewhere so deep inside that the doctors can't find it with all their machines and microcameras.
ADAM RAPP, The Children and the Wolves
There must be some unwritten law that says about fifty people have to move into your house when somebody dies. If it weren’t for the smell of death clinging to the walls, you might think it was your family’s turn to host the month neighborhood potluck supper.
ADAM RAPP, Under the Wolf, Under the Dog
When I kicked in the first TV – a nineteen-inch Magnavox with wicker speaker panels – it felt like the most perfect thing I had done in a long time. And there’s nothing like the feeling of perfection that will inspire repeated behavior.
ADAM RAPP, Under the Wolf, Under the Dog
I appreciate good criticism and I think it's really important. I don't like it when it's consumer advocacy, like how you should spend your $60. Great criticism is a kind of literature. I've written some criticism, and I really enjoy it because I think it's important for people to know that theatre is vital. Criticism is really unevenly distributed in this town. Obviously the power of the Times is discouraging. It's killing new plays, demolishing one after another.
ADAM RAPP, interview, Theatre Communications Group
In Chekhov, when people leave, a carriage is taking them away forever. The stakes are so high just for someone to make a simple exit. And now we have all this access to public transportation, automobiles and jets and the Internet; we’re so easily distracted, but the world is still designed to destroy you. It just happens quicker and faster now.
ADAM RAPP, interview, Bomb Magazine, spring 2006
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