It’s become quite fashionable for the “downtown” theater scene to inject their productions with live punk rock stylings. (Though the stated intentions vary, I can’t help but theorize that it’s got something to do with a terminally unhip theater geek’s longing for coolness.) The big problem with most of these wannabe rock shows is twofold: the music invariably sucks and the lyrics – ostensibly important for dramatic purposes – are unintelligible. (Essential Self Defense......

There’s drama pinballing through the theater blogs this week, people! In a recent letter to subscribers, Carolyn Cantor, the director of Adam Rapp’s play Essential Self-Defense, took issue with Charles Isherwood’s “scathing” review in the Times. Isherwood has become something of a punching bag among theater bloggers for his perceived stodginess, and the review is, at times, unnecessarily ad hominem: “A self-conscious exercise in stagy attitudinizing, it could almost have been composed by a......

Playwright Adam Rapp etches elegantly bleak portraits of America’s young lost souls; his Red Light Winter was an Obie-winner and Pulitzer-prize finalist, Blackbird was recently adapted into a film which Rapp also directed. (He wrote and directed his first feature, Winter Passing, which starred Ed Harris, Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell.) Rapp’s published seven novels, plays in a band, and is not someone you’d want to play one-on-one basketball with to settle a bet. His......

Adam Rapp’s play Essential Self-Defense takes place in a Midwestern anytown where children have been steadily disappearing. In this self-described “grim fairy tale”, there are no clues to indicate the culprit; the townspeople (Klieg the butcher, Chuck the barber, Isaak the Russian custodian, Sorrell the punk librarian) are all eccentric but not particularly sinister. Rapp, to his credit, isn’t interested in whodunits; his focus here is the awkward courtship between the diminutive Sadie (brought to......

THEATER: Obie Award winner Adam Rapp has just unwrapped (sorry) his new play Essential Self-Defense at Playwrights Horizons. Set in a mean Midwestern town called Bloggs, the play has, fittingly, been generating big blog buzz. The “grim fairy tale” revolves around a disgruntled misfit “who takes a job as an attack dummy in a women’s self-defense class and finds himself mysteriously drawn to the repressed bookworm who’s beating on him. But all’s not well in......