Night music

Playwright Adam Rapp on Nocturne

by Carolyn Clay

Adam Rapp looks like a frat boy at a Midwestern college. But strange ideas float behind the youthful, clean-cut features of the 32-year-old dramatist, who has already published three novels. And most of those ideas leak out in the form of plays. "The novel, for me, is very meditative, something that I know and feel I have a kind of authority with," explains Rapp, whose play Nocturne debuts at the American Repertory Theatre this Friday. "It seems like something that takes months or a year or two years. But the playwriting is this fever thing. The plays kind of burst out of me, and I don't know why. The stuff I write about in plays tends to be the stuff that keeps me up at night, and the stuff I write about in novels tends to be the things I think about during the day. So there's kind of a nocturnal haunting to my playwriting."

Nocturne, which is being directed by the mood-inducing Marcus Stern, bears out these thoughts. Like the weird, lyrical theater works of young Irish playwright Conor McPherson, it's as much narrative as drama -- a tale told in stark detail by a young man, a one-time piano prodigy, whose life and family are shattered by the accidental death of his little sister. In fact, Rapp (who is the older brother of the actor Anthony Rapp, one of the stars of the original production of Rent) initially wrote the play as a monologue. But in the ART production four characters evoked in the work will take the stage along with the narrator. There's also the still, bold visuals and the complex music-and-sound design characteristic of director Stern, whose last ART outing was Adrienne Kennedy's The Ohio State Murders.

Rapp was born in Chicago and raised in nearby Joliet, as well in New York City, the setting of Nocturne. He began writing fiction at 20 and moved to New York immediately after college in Iowa, with his first book nearly complete. Writing for the stage came later and has thus far produced an outpouring of work as well as a Princess Grace Award for playwriting, a Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, a two-year residency at Juilliard, and a recent residency with the experimental troupe Mabou Mines. "I was really excited by the prospect of doing something live, three-dimensional, where people were doing things to each other on stage," he says of his move to the theater. "Part of it, too, was just that when you have a play in rehearsal, you have a family. The novelist part of me has always felt solitary and secluded. I'm not very good at parties, at doing normal social things. I went to military school, and there were no girls there. Theater became a great excuse to talk to people.

"I actually saw something here [at the ART]. My brother was shooting a film in Lowell, and I came to visit him. And he heard about this play called The Mysteries and What's So Funny. And I came and saw that. It was one of the first plays I'd ever seen, and it was one of the most unbelievable visual experiences. This will sound strange, but I actually fell asleep during it because I was so hypnotized by it. I woke up 10 minutes later and had a dream of the play while I was watching the play. There was something about that surreal experience that galvanized something for me. And then I started trying to do it. I fell in love with reading Pinter and Shepard and John Guare, people who were trying to do things that looked familiar but strange things would enter through the door. That's something that really intrigued me and still does."

Nocturne, which takes its name from Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg's piano composition of the same name, has its seed in several soils: the 1997 death of Rapp's mother from cancer; his estrangement from his father; a "crazy tragedy" involving a friend of his nine-year-old niece. But first came the Grieg. "My best friend, who was my roommate in New York, had been a piano prodigy. I walked in the apartment one day and he was playing this amazing classical piece. He was playing the Grieg Nocturne, and it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever heard. It was incredibly sad and dark and lonely, and it was just profoundly moving. I said, `Where did that come from?' And he told me the story about how he played concerts when he was a kid, and competitions. So, talking to him about that stuff sort of spurred the idea of a piano prodigy who gives up on music for some reason." Then Rapp had to dream up the reason.

When a Juilliard actor approached him about scripting a one-man show, the writer decided to start with the derailed pianist. But other factors contributed to the disturbing nature of what became Nocturne. "I had herniated a disc in my back," the basketball-playing Rapp recalls. "And I was laid up, literally bedridden. I think I wrote it in 10 or 11 days, something crazy like that. I was on pain medication, too, so I was fading in and out of consciousness a lot. And I was reading Faulkner's The Wild Palms at the time, and I was sort of dreaming about that novel and dealing with my medication and writing my thing. So it was kind of a surreal process in itself."

Nocturne is presented by ART New Stages at the Hasty Pudding Theatre, October 13 through 29. Call 547-8300.