The Hallway Trilogy

—Marsha Norman

Multi-talented artist and provocateur Adam Rapp shocks and disturbs, weaving themes of love, suffering, and redemption throughout this alarming yet heartening critical examination of societal change. Spanning one hundred years in one Lower East Side tenement hallway, this series of connected plays begins in 1953 with Rose, in which a young, troubled actress searches for affirmation from the one person who has shown her a bit of kindness—the great playwright Eugene O'Neill. Fifty years later in Paraffin, an unhappily married couple is thrown together with a paralyzed war veteran, a bungling super, and other lost souls searching to connect during the 2003 blackout. Nursing dramatizes a horrifying future in 2053, when the hallway becomes a museum in which the financially desperate are injected with obsolete diseases for the amusement of a public that doesn't know what it means to suffer or to love.

Packed with searing dialogue and harrowing narratives, The Hallway Trilogy and (New York Times).