Humana Festival 2011: 'The Edge of Our Bodies'
Novelist and playwright Adam Rapp takes a 16-year-old girl with big news for her boyfriend to the brink of adulthood over the course of one night in New York City in “The Edge of Our Bodies, his second Humana Festival play. “The Edge of Our Bodies” runs March 22 through April 3, 2011.
Bernadette is traveling alone on a Metro-North train from her New England prep school to New York City to see her boyfriend. Along the way she encounters several older men, all of whom are somehow adrift. As she hears their stories, she makes discoveries about the world and herself and begins to see the reality of adulthood.
Rapp was inspired to write the play by his own commute on the Metro-North when he was teaching at Yale and by the story a friend told him about how alone she felt when she took the train from Brooklyn to her prep school. Unlike many of the 2011 Humana Festival plays, which feature acting ensembles, “The Edge of Ourselves” is told by a single actor. It was developed for the Humana Festival through a partnership with Louisiana State University.
More than a dozen of Rapp’s plays have been produced since 2000. His previous Humana Festival play, “Finer Noble Gases,” which premiered in 2002, went on to have several subsequent productions, including an Off-Broadway run at Rattlestick and an appearance in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, for which it won several awards including a Fringe First Award.
Since 2006, Rapp has directed most of the premieres of his plays, and he will direct this premiere as well.
Rapp is resident playwright at Edge Theater Company in New York City, where he directed his new play, “The Metal Children,” at Vineyard Theatre last year. His other plays include “Nocturne” and “Stone Cold Dead Serious,” and his novels for young adults include “The Buffalo Tree” and “Punkzilla.”
The monthlong Humana Festival of New American Plays, in its 35th year at Actors Theatre of Louisville, is underwritten by the Humana Foundation. It draws thousands of theater patrons to Louisville each year to see exciting new work from emerging and established playwrights. Three Humana Festival plays have won the Pulitzer Prize and eight have been made into motion pictures or films for television.
Posted on Mar 7, 2011 by Carla Carlton
