Most Popular Books by Adam Rapp

A religious Southern clan cite God''s will as justification for torturing each other. "... There is a certain excitement that one experiences quite quickly when exposed to his plays - it doesn''t take long to recognize a truly gifted writer who has an emotionally (and otherwise) quite powerful story to tell ... TRUEBLINKA''s title, the kiln and the Teutonic family name are not the only markers of this holocaust drama, writ small. But they are enough to set the dark, creepy, metaphor-heavy story in motion ... This is theater worth staying up for." -Les Gutman, CurtainUp "Though the title suggests a meditation on history''s worst atrocities, Adam Rapp''s TRUEBLINKA is essentially a dysfunctional-American-family play, inflated to apocalyptic proportions. In a dimly lit house somewhere in creepiest flyover country ... It''s laudable that Rapp doesn''t shy away from difficult subject matter at a time when most new plays risk so little ..." -Village Voice

It''s Christmas Eve: a Desert Storm veteran with a herniated disk and a 19-year-old runaway heroin addict share the holiday in a filthy, rundown squat on New York''s Canal Street. This unusual love story is grimly compelling, mixing gritty honesty with remarkable generosity and compassion, striking a delicate balance between the sweet and difficult moments in human interaction. "... a terrifically impressive British debut for new U S playwright Adam Rapp. Froggy and Baylis are two wrecked drifters in a New York squat ... BLACKBIRD could, in the hands of a lesser dramatist, be a crude mix of in-your-face grunge and sentimentality ... actually, the squalor here is both appalling and cryingly funny and Rapp has a brilliant ear for talk." -The Independent "There is a strange tenderness in Rapp''s writing that marks him out as one to watch. Rapp has genuine Gorky-esque talent and loves his characters as all-consumingly as they do each other." -The Guardian

Two men are snowbound in a cheap motel room in Boone, North Carolina. On a pick-up errand for their drug dealing boss, ten-year partners Burris and Dantly await the arrival of the enigmatic "Burning Man." Talk of beef jerky, Pocahontas, and the various uses of stick deodorant fill the night, but the men''s conversation is interrupted by a series of increasingly mysterious phone calls. Under a comic façade of buddies bonding in a blizzard, Rapp examines a friendship threatened by betrayal. "Rough-spoken, raunchy, and sometimes guffawingly funny, award-winning playwright and novelist Adam Rapp''s ANIMALS AND PLANTS is very different from his NOCTURNE ... The sheer liveliness of Rapp''s dialogue and his multifaceted characters keep his play afloat ... a lurid comic phantasmagoria of life on the underside of Middle America." -Markland Taylor, Variety

In WOLF IN THE RIVER, Adam Rapp explores love and neglect, the challenges of poverty, the dangerous cost of shiftlessness, the simple notion of leaving a place behind, and the value of a girl. "Savage lyricism." Ben Brantley, The New York Times "A jolt of dark energy...I can''t remember the last time I felt as invested in a fictional stage character as I did in Tana... Half the time I wasn''t sure what was real and what was fantasy or dream. Yet the story held me from start to finish." BlogCritics.org "Extraordinary... Nothing like you have ever seen before and nothing you are likely ever to see again." Theatre Reviews Limited "This is great theater. It''s hard to separate the play itself from the creative staging and perfect acting but it all adds up to as stunning a theatrical experience as anyone ever needs to have." Let''s Talk Off-Broadway

A disgruntled East Village theater company with more on their minds than playing Bingo descends upon a small New England town. They plan a heist of the local church''s cash box, but the night takes a darkly comic turn as things do not go as planned. "The ideas and sometimes the actors ricochet around the stage with such energy and scattershot purpose in Adam Rapp''s BINGO WITH THE INDIANS that they might be in a pinball machine. A dark comedy that starts with a sitcom premise and finally invokes questions about the meaning of life, the play spins out of control, but that forgivable chaos comes from a writer who hasn''t reined in his overabundance of ideas. The entire play is set in a shabby New England motel where three members of a New York theater group have arrived with a scheme: They''ll steal the cash box from the local church bingo (it happens to be Indian night) and use the money to rent a performance space back home ... BINGO WITH THE INDIANS explores themes that run through other Rapp plays (most prominently, RED LIGHT WINTER; most recently, AMERICAN SLIGO): how far people will go to get what they want; how they face desires they barely knew they had; how grief seeps to the surface, and pent-up rage explodes." -Caryn James, The New York Times

On the night of a terrible storm, a single mother and her younger son await the arrival of the older son, who has broken out of prison. Two others arrive before him: a stranger with a wounded leg and a girl with a suitcase. Nothing will ever be the same. "Adam Rapp''s play ... is just the ticket - brutal Southern Midwest grotesque, otherworldly and darkly human. It takes place on a stormy night, in a one-room house furnished with scavenged car parts and a PVC-pipe kitchen zoo table; as the play begins, Bean Scully is sucking the leech welts on her naked teen-age son''s body. Her other son, Jeff, has busted out of prison and is making his way home, and as the night goes on, various wanderers - a man with a bullet in his leg, a pregnant teen, two half-mute desperadoes - show up and wreak incredible havoc. Rapp''s dialogue is beautiful mayhem, full of mudslops and dogsnakes and hog gravy, and we care just enough about these strange souls to be devastated by their pain. Though neither Rapp nor the company nor the audience may ever understand what this work is doing or why, it jolts and haunts all involved in its happy amoralism." -The New Yorker "Adam Rapp''s GHOSTS IN THE COTTONWOODS ... is without question some of the most raw and intestine twisting theater happening in New York City." -Slant Magazine

Two young grifters try to strike a deal with the devil during the hottest summer on record. "An ambitious and prodigiously talented writer." Charles Isherwood, Variety "Rapp...shows an exuberant love for the written word... [He] tells stories that encase classical themes--class and envy, ambition and alienation--in blunt terms and in modern settings." Jesse McKinley, The New York Times "One of the more daring young stylists working today." David Cote, Time Out

A pinball wizard for the twenty-first century, Wynne Ledbetter is surrounded by despair. His father is wasting away on workman''s comp, his mother is a double-shift waitress obsessed with the lives of the saints, and his sister is a dropout junky. But Wynne has a plan. One of only three players in the country to solve the Tang Dynasty computer game, he will travel to the championships in New York City, where the winner pockets a cool million dollars. With this money, he''ll put his sister in rehab, pay for his father''s operation, and employ his mother in his very own computer repair shop. But he has to get there first. "STONE COLD DEAD SERIOUS...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." Bruce Weber, The New York Times

We investigate the linear and interactive influences of leader-empowering behaviors, team experience, and the degree of virtuality on team planning processes and performance among virtual sales teams. Collecting data across three separate time periods with 218 pharmaceutical sales teams, our results indicate that empowering leadership improves team planning processes and is moderated by the team''s experience. Interestingly, it seems that, as teams gain more experience, they are less likely to engage in effective planning; however, these effects are attenuated as the team becomes more virtual in nature. Our findings have relevance for sales managers and salespeople in terms of leveraging team processes to influence performance as well as in terms of presenting the issues associated with virtual means of interaction.

Research examining technology and the sales force has a long, developed history that spans several decades. From initial research reviewing sales force laptop usage to more recent studies investigating the effects of advanced customer relationship management applications, much insight has been garnered regarding technology and sales. However, much of this investigation has occurred in business-to-business environments, leaving what we believe to be a considerable gap in knowledge on technology in business-to-consumer settings. In this paper, we briefly review some areas of research that we believe have seen abundant investigation and offer other fruitful avenues for research. We conclude that in business-to-consumer sales interactions, technology takes on a varying role and often enables a salesperson to complete a sale successfully, but seldom replaces the human interaction necessary to further develop the relationship.

Given the importance of new products, firms may be prone to “over-manage” sales personnel by using behavior-based control systems that dictate the performance of particular activities related to the introduction. Such controls may be especially tempting given that favorable salesperson product perceptions actually yield less effort on the new product, and behavior-based controls can offset this tendency. However, using longitudinal data from a sample of 226 pharmaceutical salespeople, along with external ratings from customers and archival measures of effort and sales performance, we demonstrate that such a strategy is short-sighted. Behavior-based controls constrain a salesperson''s ability to appropriately allocate effort across his or her customer base, negatively impacting customer product perceptions and, ultimately, new product sales. In contrast, outcome-based control systems enable salespeople to work smarter, and their corresponding effort on behalf of the new product has a more positive effect on customer product perceptions and new product sales.

Successfully managing employees'' corporate social performance (CSP) perceptions requires insights into their antecedents. However, not much is currently known on the subject. We contribute to the micro-level corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature in two ways: (a) we investigate the antecedents of employees'' CSP perceptions; (b) we integrate both customers'' perceptions of CSP-as these are construed by employees-and employees'' own CSP perceptions into a comprehensive framework. Specifically, we examine (a) the antecedent role of employee-customer CSR causal meta-attributions (i.e., what employees think customers think about the company''s motives underlying CSR programs); and (b) the antecedent and moderating role of employee-customer CSP meta-perceptions (i.e., what employees think customers think about the company''s overall social performance) on employees'' CSP perceptions and, in turn, on employees'' affective organizational commitment. Our study highlights that employees'' CSR assessments are more complex than previously thought with employees guessing the perceptions (and attributions) others make about their firm.

Do employee judgments of their organization''s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs relate to CSR-specific performance and in-role job performance? Can middle managers influence the formation of such judgments and what factors might moderate such cascading influences? To answer these yet unaddressed questions, we conduct three studies. Study 1 takes an organizational justice perspective and tests our baseline model. Results show that employees'' CSR judgments trigger their affective commitment and performance on extra-role CSR-specific behaviors; however, extra-role CSR-specific performance is unrelated to in-role job performance. Study 2 replicates Study 1''s findings while, in addition, applies a social information processing approach and offers novel insights by demonstrating the cascading effects of managers'' CSR judgments on employee CSR judgments. This approach argues that investments made in CSR programs in order to improve employee judgments and behaviors may be unsuccessful if employees'' CSR judgments are based on social information that remains unchanged. In addition to replicating the findings from study 1 and 2, study 3 draws from middle management involvement and leadership theories to show that leadership styles and managers'' involvement in implementing deliberate strategy can strengthen or weaken these cascading effects. It thus highlights the important role of middle-managers as "linking pins" in the CSR strategy implementation process. Further, Study 3 shows that employee in-role CSR-specific performance relates positively with employee in-role job performance, thus substantiating the importance of managing CSR judgments.

This research focuses on the impact of leadership empowerment behavior (LEB) on customer service satisfaction and sales performance, as mediated by salespeople''s self-efficacy and adapt ability. Moreover, the authors propose an interactive relationship whereby LEB will be differentially effective as a function of employees'' empowerment readiness. The authors'' hypotheses are tested using survey data from a sample of 231 salespeople in the pharmaceutical field, along with external ratings of satisfaction from 864 customers and archival sales performance information. Results indicated that contrary to popular belief, employees with low levels of product/industry knowledge and low experience benefit the most from leadership behaviors that are empowering, whereas high-knowledge and experienced employees reap no clear benefit. The authors conclude with directions for future research and application.

In this research, we apply a team self-regulatory perspective to build and test theory focusing on the relationships between team efficacy and 2 key team performance criteria: a performance behavior (i.e., team effort) and a performance outcome (i.e., objective team sales). We theorize that rather than having a linear association, the performance benefits of team efficacy reach a point of inflection, reflective of too much of a good thing. Further, in an effort to establish a boundary condition of the inverted-U shaped relationship we predict, we also test the moderating role played by team goal monitoring in the nonmonotonic relationship between team efficacy and team performance. The results from a lagged field test, in which we collect multisource data from 153 technology sales teams, reveal a significant curvilinear association that is moderated by team goal monitoring behavior. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

This research focuses on the impact that salesperson knowledge and empowering leader behaviors have on salesperson working smarter and working harder behaviors. In turn, we examine the impact of working harder and smarter on customer service, customer satisfaction, and ultimately, on sales performance. Moreover, we propose an interactive relationship, whereby the influences of leader empowering behaviors and salespersons'' knowledge will be moderated by salespersons'' experience. We tested our hypotheses using survey data from a sample of 175 sales people in the pharmaceutical field, along with external ratings of salespersons'' knowledge from sales managers, customer ratings of sales satisfaction and service, and archival measures of salespersons'' effort and performance. Results indicate that contrary to popular belief, employees with low levels of product/industry experience benefit the most from leader empowering behaviors. Also, we find that employees with lower levels of experience and higher levels of knowledge are more inclined to work harder. We conclude with directions for future research.