The Hallway Trilogy
Opening Night: February 24, 2011
Closing: March 27, 2011
Theater: Rattlestick Theatre
Adam Rapp’s Hallway Trilogy is made up of three full-length plays are set fifty years apart. Part 1, Rose, directed by Rapp, takes place on the evening of November 28th, 1953, the day following the death of Eugene O’Neill and concerns a young actress who has been struggling with severe depression (diagnosed as melancholia in those days) whose arrival in a lower east side tenement affects the lives of several of its residents. Part 2, Paraffin, directed by Daniel Aukin, is set on the first evening of the 2003 New York City blackout and concerns a married couple – a husband addicted to heroin, his pregnant wife, and his brother’s unrequited love for his wife. Though it’s now 50 years later, the affects of that young actress’s visit are still being felt. Part 3, Nursing, directed by Trip Cullman, is set in 2053 in a disease-free New York when the tenement has been transformed into a museum where young men and women in need of cash are injected with old-fashioned diseases for the amusement of the public. On this night the air-tight glass wall fractures.
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February 24, 2011
Spend a few minutes — or even a few hours — wandering the halls of your average New York apartment building, and you are not likely to see much more eye-popping action than the collecting of newspapers, the wrangling of children into chunky strollers and the delicate dance of polite avoidance that most locals consider all that is required of neighborly intimacy.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 25, 2011
Even theater companies who pride themselves on presenting edgy new plays can fall into predictable grooves. So you’ve got to hand it to the Rattlestick for shaking itself up for Adam Rapp’s ambitious and sometimes outrageous work, "The Hallway Trilogy," whose three self-contained stories unfold in a lower East Side tenement 50 years apart.
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February 25, 2011
As you walk along the passage that is Adam Rapp’s nearly five-hour triptych devoted to an architectural commonplace, you notice a disturbing design: Progressively, the paint peels and flakes; the plaster cracks, revealing listing joists and termite-nibbled shims; trash gradually piles up, raising a fetid stench and getting underfoot; finally, your journey stops at a lightless dead end. In other words, Rapp’s trilogy begins strong but eventually breaks down and leads nowhere. Conceivably, Rapp would approve of the metaphor; the Hallway Trilogy—which stays in place while a century passes—might just be about our voyage to death.
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February 28, 2011
“The Hallway Trilogy” is certainly playwright-director Adam Rapp’s largest project to date. But when viewed as a whole, it comes across as a puzzling, pointless and oversized experiment.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 23, 2011
Admirable acting and keen design work — and even some good writing — unfortunately cannot deny a dawning recognition that Adam Rapp’s new three-play collection, “The Hallway Trilogy,” is a dramatic case of patchy and gradually diminishing returns.
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