Adam Rapp Quotations

Some of the greatest works of theater, from Chekov's work to modern playwrights', consist of just a few people in a room with no one leaving.

I think there is a complicated side effect to overcoming evil in that we are forever changed by it. I think after we ingest some of the cruelty of the world, it takes years off of our lives, but it also gives us wisdom and a little grace, hopefully a sense of compassion.

I have to be entertained by what I'm writing, so a lot of my stuff has a goofiness or scatological quality. If these characters can entertain me, then I feel like I can deal with the darker or more serious stuff.

When I came to New York, I was really awkward. I went to military academy for high school, so I didn't have the socialization that most kids do. When I got here, I was five years behind everybody. Talking to women was weird for me.

When I work in the theater, you know you'll get this almost devotional, religious experience where you're breaking bread with everyone every day.

I hate the idea of sheltering kids from challenging books. It's just another form of conservative fear that promotes ignorance more than anything else.

One of the tricks to writing great plays is to get people in a room together and not let them leave. You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.

I would hope that the staffs at juvenile detention centers and reform schools are carefully chosen so that there is a community of support and hope.

My work is always more emotional than I am. My characters say things to each other that I get accused of not being able to say to my girlfriend.

I was born in Chicago, then I spent most of my youth in Joliet, Illinois which is about thirty minutes south, and I went to a military academy for high school in Wisconsin. Then I went to college, on a basketball scholarship to a small school in Iowa, so I'm like Mr. Midwest.

I like to write about teenagers because it's such an uncertain and dramatic time.

I dont see a lot of movies that portray the East Village as well as I think they can.

When you're poor, you don't want anyone to know you're poor.

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.

I was a jock in college and high school, but I didn't hang out with the jocks. I was sort of a nerd who didn't look like a nerd. I never really fit into any social set.

Film directing has perfected my theater directing. I think when I first started directing, a lot of my stuff was very lateral; I was afraid to have the actors' backs turned away, afraid to put them too far upstage, and I think once I did more things with film, I got more interested in composition.

I just love working with actors, and I love working with writers, working with designers.

I love plays that have musical moments. I'm not a big fan of musicals per se, but I love straight plays that have musical edges to them. I don't know if I will ever be able to structure a musical, but 'Finer Noble Gases' is as close as I've gotten.

I saw 'Six Degrees of Separation' because my brother was in it. It was a watershed experience. It was theatrical and scary, and New York functioned like a character. John Guare became a hero for me.

There was a kind of physical anarchy that dominated most of my younger life. I was always too skinny, not hairy enough, my voice jumped around. It was a thing that drove me away from towel lines in gym class.

When I'm directing, I'm pretty much not writing, but when I'm not directing I am writing a lot.

I had a sort of bad experiences as a playwright early on, when directors were putting in huge concepts that I didn't intend, or they were stylizing something that was compromising the play, so I started to think like, "well if I'm going to fight against this, I should learn how to direct".

I have never successfully written in the third person. If there's a rhythm or a musicality that interests me, I become obsessed with the character, and I just have this need to spend time with him or her. Sometimes I'll be in the park playing ball, and I'll hear a kid say something that I've never heard before. Sometimes one word can set me off.

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.

The biggest audience for Off Broadway is mostly coming in on a train - either Upper East Siders or Metro-North. I go to the theater, and everyone around me is over 50. How interested will they be in my kind of work?

When you're making under-million-dollar films, it becomes so much about actors' availability. When you're using big actors for small films, you're in second or third position to the big monoliths.

You have to escape to survive, as you must survive to escape.

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.

I grew up eating hamburger helper, macaroni and cheese, and drinking lots of milk, and looked at lots of cows; but I feel like a New Yorker now, I've lived here for sixteen years.

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.

I've never really felt good at the parties, but I have enough friends now that I feel social, I used to feel very antisocial, but I think the theater helps.

You can always count on the New York Times to cut your legs off.

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.

I've never really felt that I've had the right hair cut, or had the right clothes.

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.

Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.

We only have so much time.... Time will kill you – it really will.

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.

A typical day for me is I'm writing when I'm not directing.

When I got inside, I just sort of stood there. There's nothing stranger than the smell of someone else's house. The scent goes right to your stomach. Mary's house smelled like lemon furniture polish and oatmeal cookies and logs in a fireplace. For some reason it made me want to curl up in the fetal position. I could have slept right there on their kitchen table.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes when I'm directing, the stage manager will have a good idea and that's okay with me.

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.

I don't mind him not talking so much, because you can hear his voice in your heart; the same way you can hear a song in your head even if there isn't a radio playing; the same way you can hear those blackbirds flying when they're not in the sky

When I am directing, it is much, much, much, much, much different. I'm a much more practical person in the world, I show up on time, I am very rigorous about scheduling, and I am very focused. But when I'm writing I am just a big, irresponsible mess and I'm just impossible to get in touch with, and I don't spend time with friends.

I find auditioning to be a very illusive process, where actors come in with this really big result with no process, so it's a lie already at work.

I feel that I'd rather know an actors' work, or have an instinct about them and sit down and have coffee with them, or I'll see them in something and I'll see if I can get along with them in some way, shape, or form.

I think auditioning can be very reductive and I just hate how actors work really hard and most of them aren't going to get the job, and I hate putting them through that.

The rooms I tend to be in are pretty democratic and the best idea wins.

I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter.

What I've learned in the last few years is that I am merely a storyteller.

I think, for me, when I direct my own work it's just an extension of the authorship.

I don't put big concepts on my work, and it's all often about keeping actors in a room together and not letting them leave.

I think I'm a little more daunted by when the machinery of the play is really huge.

When it's just a few scenes and a couple of actors behaving in a room, I feel very confident with that.

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.

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.

It's strange, people have asked me what my schedule is and what is my process like, and I can't even answer it.

Whenever I've been in rehearsals, it's really fun, there's always laughing.

I think because my brother was an actor and I just saw how he struggled through, I guess I'm sensitive to it.

I began stealing a lot of ideas from other directors I had worked with.

I don't like the sort of hierarchical, totalitarian type of room a lot of directors can find themselves in.

I try not to write more than two or three, I try to just write one if possible, I write till the end at least a draft of a play or a novel; but sometimes, I'll take a break for a couple weeks for a project that is paying me money like a television project which I try to stay away from just to stay financially ahead of the game.