The United States has been attacked. Men are being castrated, women enumerated. Ellen has been in hiding for fifty-two days, subsisting on very little, hoping against hope for her husband to return. As the world around her falls further into senseless chaos, she takes an unlikely action, one that just might signal a new beginning.

Dr. Bertram and Sandra Cabot invite longtime friends Dirk and Celeste Von Stofenberg to their beautiful Connecticut Gold Coast home in honor of James, the Von Stofenbergs' only son, who has recently been released from an esteemed private psychiatric hospital. The feast promises to be delicious, but when Sandra enlists Dirk to help her change the course of her life, the sky turns a strange color, Canadian geese start crashing into the bay window, and the fate of the evening tilts toward an inevitable conclusion that promises to change the lives of all who come to the table.

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist comes a hilarious and heartbreaking novel about a musician climbing back from rock bottom. As winter deepens in Pollard, Illinois, 30-something Francis Falbo is holed up in an attic apartment, recovering from a series of traumas: his mother's death, his beloved wife's desertion, and his once-ascendant rock band's irreconcilable break-up. He hasn't changed out of his bathrobe-"the uniform of a Life in Default"-for nine days. All he has left is his childhoom home, whose remaining rooms he rents to a cast of eccentric tenants, becoming increasingly entangled in their lives, with results that are by turns disastrous, hysterical, and ultimately healing. KNOW YOUR BEHOLDER is an uproarious and affecting novel about what we do when our lives have crumbled around us and we must collect the jagged pieces and begin anew. Seldom have our foibles and our efforts to perservere in spite of them been laid bare with such heart and hope.

Drama / Characters: 2m, 2f / Interior An ailing mother and her teenaged son flee Illinois and a crumbling marriage for the relative calm and safety of a midtown Manhattan hotel. Mom holds tickets to a popular musical about love among bohemians. Her son isn't interested, so Mom takes the kindly cabdriver instead, while the boy entertains a visitor from down the hall, an enigmatic, potentially dangerous young woman. Kindness is a play about the possibility for sympathy in a harsh world and the meaning of mercy in the face of devastating circumstances. Premiered at Playwrights Horizons, New York City in 2008. "Compelling. A well-crafted mini-thriller, which keeps you in suspense until the final blackout." - Joe Dziemianowics, New York Daily News "Rapp has raised some provocative questions about the prickly mother/son relationship he has drawn in such detail."- Marilyn Stasio, Variety "Pungent, vivid...Rapp finds a gentle approach to his characters' physical and emotional pain without turning sentimental. His playful side is on display too." [Four stars] - Diane Snyder, Time Out New York "Adam Rapp can write dense, tense, funny dialogue." - Charles Isherwood, The New York Times "A taut and involving dark comedy. Hilarious and unsettling." - Dan Bacalzo, TheatreMania.com

In small-town America, a young adult novel about teen pregnancy is banned by the local school board, igniting a fierce and violent debate over abortion, religious beliefs, and modern feminism. Its directionless New York City author arrives in town to defend the book and finds that it has inspired a group of local teens to rebel in strange and unexpected ways. A timely and unforgettable drama about the failure of urban and heartland America to understand each other, "The Metal Children" explores what happens when fiction becomes a matter of life and death.

In "Essential Self-Defense," disgruntled misfit Yul Carroll takes a job as an attack dummy in a women's self-defense class and finds himself mysteriously drawn to Sadie, the repressed bookworm mercilessly honing her skills on him. Meanwhile, all's not well on the unassuming Midwestern streets of Bloggs: with local children vanishing at an alarming rate, our hero, his lady friend, and a motley assortment of poets, butchers, and punk librarians prepare to battle the darkness on the edge of town.

"Recent plays from "one of the more daring young stylists working today" (David Cote, Time Out New York)"
Adam Rapp's plays have captivated audiences across the country with their unflinching explorations of the good, the bad, and the ugly in America's heartland and cities. Gathered here are three of his latest works: Faster, in which two young grifters try to strike a deal with the devil during the hottest summer on record; Finer Noble Gases, a lament for a band of arrested thirty-year-olds slouching toward adulthood amid East Village decay; and the Off-Broadway hit Stone Cold Dead Serious. An honest, strange, and humorous look at a blue-collar family struggling to survive in the face of disability and addiction, and the seemingly surreal lengths their teenage son will go to save them from themselves, the play prompted Bruce Weber to rave in The New York Times: "Rapp is very gifted, and, even rarer, he has something to say . . . Stone Cold Dead Serious is] brave, compassionate, and . . . breathtakingly moving. It is the work of a playwright who is forging a real voice . . . Its rendering of the shared language of loved ones illustrates how families can remain intimate even when they are in shards. Its depiction of a working-class America that is unable to dream of anything beyond enduring is as sincerely sad a commentary on our culture as I've seen in recent memory. And its fear for young people is, unfortunately, deeply convincing."

It's totally familiar but dreamlike at the same time," observes one American of Amsterdam's notorious Red Light District in the stunning new work from Adam Rapp. Escaping their lives in Manhattan, former college buddies Matt and Davis take off to the Netherlands and find themselves thrown into a bizarre love triangle with a beautiful young prostitute named Christina. But the romance they find in Europe is eventually overshadowed by the truth they discover at home. Written with an unflinching poetic beauty, "Red Light Winter "is a play of sexual intrigue that explores the myriad and misguided ways we seek to fill the empty spaces inside us.