Author Description

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 cryin