Adam Rapp's latest play, 'Red Light Winter', has largely autobiographical elements, and he has only himself to blame for the criticism and the plaudits, he tells Peter Crawley
Late in the autumn of 1997, Adam Rapp, the American novelist, playwright, director, film-maker, graphic novelist and occassional rock musician, went to Amsterdam on a mission. Rapp had decided that his best friend, who had been chaste for over three-and-a-half years, needed to get back on the horse and, to that end, he went to the red-light district for "window shopping", as he puts it in the alarmingly candid author's note to his Pulitzer-Prize nominated drama Red Light Winter.
His friend consented on one condition; that Rapp also have sex with the same prostitute. It was a complex extracurricular triangle, Rapp wrote, with neither shame nor pride, that "I was to become the hypotenuse of". It became more complicated, however, when his friend formed an emotional attachment either to the prostitute or another woman who they met in Paris (the details seem to shift between Rapp's written account and the intense report he gives me from his East Village apartment in New York), and that woman (or maybe the prostitute) became attracted to Rapp. Either way, these events have become the substance of Rapp's controversial breakthrough play, now receiving its Irish premiere courtesy of PurpleHeart Theatre Company, in which a perpetually "emerging" playwright called Matt is set up with a demure French prostitute called Christina by his sexually predacious friend Davis. Rapp, a burningly intelligent 39-year-old, writes and talks of his own experience with such unflinching candour that I begin to wonder if his story is entirely credible. How much of him should we see in this play? "There are parts of me that are very much Davis and there are parts of me that are very much Matt," he says. "I was haunted by this event that happened in 1997. I wanted to write about irrational, unrequited love and the damage it can wreak on people."
And yet every step of Rapp's play encourages an autobiographical reading: it is so self-referential that by act two, Matt - a much-awarded, seldom-produced, constantly emerging playwright - has begun writing a play about the events of the first act. Was Rapp - a much awarded, seldom-produced, constantly emerging playwright - sending up his own position? "It was funny," he says. "We did the very first production in a very small way at Steppenwolf, and that production moved to an off-Broadway venue in New York. I had no idea it was going to catch the success that it did. I knew I was exposing myself in a weird way. It wasn't really intentional but nothing else seemed to be working, so I just went for it and didn't shy away from anything. Ironically, the way it was received was so strong I almost immediately lost my emerging playwright status."
The American theatre - and new playwriting in particular - is one of the most conservative art forms you're likely to find, which makes Rapp's success both unusual and understandable. For all the edginess of this play's theme, the griminess of its dramaturgy and the misogynistic shock of its denouement, Red Light Winter is deeply traditional in form: act one and act two both take place in a room, detailed with near Ibsenite clarity.
The irony is not lost on Rapp, whose influences tend to lean towards Europe and include such radicals as Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill. "What's really crazy is that in the last few years I've been called avant-garde. But I'm not breaking any form. My plays are straight-up, beginning-middle-and-end and a lot of times they happen in one room, in real time. I'm hardly breaking any new ground; it's just that these [ type of] characters are not seen on the stage any more. Or the difficult, hard actions that happen at the end - for instance, in this play - are really difficult for people to see, so they think that's new wave or avant-garde."
RAPP, WHO FREELY ADMITS to being a control-freak, likes the narrative possibilities of all media, although filmmaking tends to deplete him. "It's such an unbelievable mountain to climb," he says. He has written and directed two films so far - Winter Passing and Blackbird - and will next direct the film version of Red Light Winter, "and maybe one other film", but he hopes to return his concentration to novel-writing and plays and directing - something he turned to, having "grown weary of other directors distorting my work".
"I think it's just a continuation of the authorship," Rapp says of directing. "When I'm directing a work, I want the audience to be involved in every single moment, every breath. In that sense I'm a total control-freak, but if you talked to the actors they'd probably say I'm wildly free and collaborative with them."
He is not slow to voice his extreme displeasure with productions that have taken liberties with his work, to such an extent that PurpleHeart Theatre Company must now be quaking in its boots - Rapp will attend the opening. "Oh yeah, I have a really hard time seeing my work in the hands of other people," he says, less than reassuringly.
I wonder, though, if he might anticipate a negative reaction to Christina, the implausible prostitute who is not who she claims to be, who bewilderingly falls in love with her client, who follows him to America, who mysteriously contracts AIDS, who is brutally ravaged, and who is ultimately destroyed. Is this a deeply misogynist fantasy or is it meant to be provocative? "It's very provocative to hear her described like that," Rapp replies. "To be completely honest, when I was writing, I was thinking of her as a very vulnerable person. I agree that on the page she might feel like some cipher or slaughtered lamb or Madonna/whore - but I never thought of her that way. I feel she is largely enigmatic to those two men. We don't know the truth about her."
It is hard to accept Rapp's definition of her as a "survivor" - particularly when she is so mercilessly destroyed - but when I suggest that Rapp may be an equal-opportunity misanthrope he brightens a little. "Absolutely! I've been accused of misogyny in this work, and maybe a few others, because of the way I write for women and men. I love writing women and I love writing complicated women and I think some of my women are more complicated and interesting than the men. In this case it was just two on one and because of the fantasy aspect of picking up a hooker, it shook down to a lot of people interpreting it as just me getting off on it or something, which is not the case."
Given the autobiographical stance of the play, however, he only has himself to blame. "And that's fine," he concedes, "I guess I did speak about it openly." Much of the play is complete fabrication, he adds, thus avoiding any potentially embarrassing admissions. Well, except for one. "The thing that did happen to Matt that definitely did happen to me was we both got Giardia," he says of the deeply unpleasant parasitic cousin to Cryptosporidium. "That's the one thing in the play I can say definitely happened."
• Red Light Winter runs at the Mill Theatre Dundrum from June 4-6
