The next work for the stage from the Pulitzer finalist Adam Rapp, Essential Self-Defense. In Essential Self-Defense , disgruntled misfit Yul Carroll takes a job as an attack dummy in a women's self-defense class and finds himself mysteriously drawn to Sadie, the repressed bookworm mercilessly honing her skills on him. Meanwhile, all's not well on the unassuming Midwestern streets of Bloggs: with local children vanishing at an alarming rate, our hero, his lady friend, and a motley assortment of poets, butchers, and punk librarians prepare to battle the darkness on the edge of town. “Rapp . . . is a gifted storyteller. He makes demands on his audience, and he rewards its close attention with depth and elegance.” ― John Lahr, The New Yorker “A passionate writer making good on his early promise.” ― David Cote, Time Out New York “Few dramatists today write more pungent dialogue.” ― Robert Brustein, The New Republic “Rapp is very gifted, and, even rarer, he has something to say.” ― Bruce Weber, The New York Times “An ambitious and prodigiously talented writer.” ― Charles Isherwood, Variety Adam Rapp is an OBIE Award-winning playwright and director, as well as a novelist, filmmaker, actor, and musician. His play The Purple Lights of Joppa Illinois had its world première last month at South Coast Repertory. His other plays include Red Light Winter (Citation from the American Theatre Critics Association, a Lucille Lortel Nomination for Best New Play, two OBIE Awards, and was named a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize), Blackbird, The Metal Children, Finer Noble Gases, Through The Yellow Hour, The Hallway Trilogy, Nocturne, Ghosts in the Cottonwoods, Animals and Plants, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Faster, Gompers, Essential Self-Defense, American Slingo, and Kindness. For film, he wrote the screenplay for Winter Passing; and recently directed Loitering with Intent. Rapp has been the recipient of the 1999 Princess Grace Award for Playwriting, a 2000 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, and Boston’s Elliot Norton Award; and was short-listed for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, received the 2006 Princess Grace Statue, a 2007 Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellowship, and the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. FEAR AND LONELINESSEssential Self-Defense started out as a lark. An ex-roommate was telling me how she had been in a women's self-defense class in New York, in which she had to assault an attack dummy that was an actual man dressed in an enormous foam suit. My first question to her was, What does this man do? She told me that he simply stood there until he was put down. My second question was, Who would take a job like this? I imagined the late Andy Kaufman in some oversized Nerf costume. Theatrically, the image of a man wearing such a thing, being assaulted by a woman who intends to take him down, seemed like a great idea to jump-start a play. So that's what I began with. I had no idea why this was an intriguing possibility for an evening of theatre or where the thing might go, but it certainly felt like a man and a woman literally colliding in a women's self-defense studio was fertile soil. I also was pretty sure that some version of love would be involved, as well as notions of irrational fear, personal safety, loneliness, a scurrying sewer rat, and whatever that thing is that lurks in the woods behind the 7-Eleven.I started thinking a lot about the play while I was at the Pittsburgh City Theatre, in rehearsals for my play Gompers (when I'm not directing, I'm a terrible daydreamer). I was originally going to conceive ESD as a two-person karaoke opera, with two locations: a self-defense studio, represented by a wrestling mat, and a karaoke bar, represented by a drum kit, a microphone and mic stand, and a cocktail table. Simplicity was heavy on my mind after watching director Tracy Brigden and the City Theatre Company production staff attempt to figure out how to make the ten-character, six-location monster that was Gompers work. With ESD, structurally, my original intention was that scenes alternate sequentially between the women's self-defense studio and the karaoke bar. My characters (who even early on were called Yul and Sadie) would sing the story of their lives to each other during the karaoke scenes and then Sadie would beat on Yul in the self-defense studio, with a third character acting only as a drummer. This drummer would percussively accompany the beatings during the self-defense studio scenes, conveniently oblivious to that world, and play along with all the karaoke performances as the bar's house drummer. I thought he might also evolve into some sort of antagonist to Yul and Sadie's relationship.When I began actually writing the play, I was bewildered by our country's obsession with the manhunt for Osama bin Laden and the blind, at-all-cos