Kindness
- Written and directed by Adam Rapp
ADAM RAPP (Playwright / Director) was last represented at Playwrights Horizons with Essential Self-Defense in 2007. His other plays include Red Light Winter (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Obie Award), Bingo with the Indians, American Sligo, Blackbird (two Drama Desk nominations), Stone Cold Dead Serious, Nocturne, Ghosts in the Cottonwoods, Animals and Plants, Finer Noble Gases, Faster, Trueblinka, Dreams of the Salthorse and Gompers. His plays have been collected in Stone Cold Dead Serious and Other Plays and he has written seven novels. He wrote and directed his first feature film, Winter Passing, starring Ed Harris, Will Ferrell and Zooey Deschanel, for Focus Features. He is also the recipient of two Lincoln Center le Compte de Nuoy Awards; a fellowship to the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France; the 1999 Princess Grace Award for Playwriting; a 2000 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays; a 2000 Suite Residency with Mabou Mines; the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights; Boston’s Elliot Norton Award; and was short-listed for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. He is the Resident Playwright for Edge Theater.
An ailing mother and her teenaged son flee Illinois and a crumbling marriage for the relative calm and safety of a midtown Manhattan hotel. Mom holds tickets to a popular musical about love and redemption. Her son, a gifted student currently enrolled at a prestigious military academy, isn’t interested. So Mom takes the kindly cabdriver instead, while the boy entertains a visitor from down the hall, an enigmatic young woman seeking solace after a tumultuous, potentially dangerous evening. KINDNESS is a play about the possibility for sympathy in a harsh world and the meaning of mercy in the face of devastating circumstances.
Featuring
Christopher Denham
Annette O'Toole
Ray Anthony Thomas
Katherine Waterston
Creative Team
Lauren Helpern
Scenic DesignerDaphne Javitch
Costume DesignerMary Louise Geiger
Lighting DesignerEric Shim
Sound DesignerRichard Hodge
Production Stage ManagerPhotos of (1) Christopher Denham and Annette O'Toole; (2) Annette O'Toole; (3) Katherine Waterston; and (4) Annette O'Toole and Ray Anthony Thomas by Joan Marcus.
Compelling. A well-crafted mini-thriller, which keeps you in suspense until the final blackout.
Adam Rapp proves himself the definitive director of his own work. Christopher Denham has the sly wit and restless intelligence to play Dennis.
FOUR STARS. A terrifically robust performance from Annette O’Toole.