The Hallway Trilogy

"Adam writes like nobody else, his fierce poetic power as inescapable as the doom that waits for his characters…his touch is that of a master in the making." —Marsha Norman

Multi-talented artist and provocateur Adam Rapp shocks and disturbs, weaving themes of love, suffering, and redemption throughout this alarming yet heartening critical examination of societal change. Spanning one hundred years in one Lower East Side tenement hallway, this series of connected plays begins in 1953 with Rose, in which a young, troubled actress searches for affirmation from the one person who has shown her a bit of kindness—the great playwright Eugene O'Neill. Fifty years later in Paraffin, an unhappily married couple is thrown together with a paralyzed war veteran, a bungling super, and other lost souls searching to connect during the 2003 blackout. Nursing dramatizes a horrifying future in 2053, when the hallway becomes a museum in which the financially desperate are injected with obsolete diseases for the amusement of a public that doesn't know what it means to suffer or to love.

Packed with searing dialogue and harrowing narratives, The Hallway Trilogy "bristles with humor" and "contains some of Rapp's most sensitive and mature writing" (New York Times).

Adam Rapp is an award-winning playwright, novelist, filmmaker, and director. His plays include Nocturne, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Finer Noble Gases, The Sound Inside, the Pulitzer Prize finalist Red Light Winter, and the book for the Tony Award–winning musical The Outsiders, cowritten with Justin Levine. His novels include Wolf at the Table, Know Your Beholder, and YA fiction that includes Punkzilla, The Copper Elephant, and 33 Snowfish. He has also worked in television and film, writing on such projects as Showtime's American Rust, HBO's In Treatment, and served as both writer and director on the films Winter Passing and Blackbird.