Synopsis
A devastating, elegant, and gripping dissection of the American dream, Adam Rapp's Nocturne signals a brave new voice in American theater.
"Fifteen years ago I killed my sister."
So begins Adam Rapp's highly acclaimed play Nocturne, in which a 32-year-old former piano prodigy recounts the tragic events that tore his family apart.
With a keen eye for human relationships and a deft ear for language, Rapp explores the aftershock of this unimaginable event. The father is so incapable of forgiveness he puts a gun in his son's mouth; the mother so shattered, she deserts the family and eventually takes leave of her sanity altogether; the son--only 17 years old at the time--sets out for New York City. There, he seeks an uneasy refuge in books and reinvents himself as a writer. Across the decade and a half that follows he tries to cope with the ramifications of his own anguish and estrangement while making a desperate search for redemption.
About the Author
Adam Rapp is an OBIE Award-winning playwright and director, as well as a novelist, filmmaker, actor, and musician. His play The Purple Lights of Joppa Illinois had its world première last month at South Coast Repertory. His other plays include Red Light Winter (Citation from the American Theatre Critics Association, a Lucille Lortel Nomination for Best New Play, two OBIE Awards, and was named a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize), Blackbird, The Metal Children, Finer Noble Gases, Through The Yellow Hour, The Hallway Trilogy, Nocturne, Ghosts in the Cottonwoods, Animals and Plants, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Faster, Gompers, Essential Self-Defense, American Slingo, and Kindness. For film, he wrote the screenplay for Winter Passing; and recently directed Loitering with Intent. Rapp has been the recipient of the 1999 Princess Grace Award for Playwriting, a 2000 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, and Boston’s Elliot Norton Award; and was short-listed for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, received the 2006 Princess Grace Statue, a 2007 Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellowship, and the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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