Adam Rapp on The Outsiders

Adam Rapp is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter whose work spans theater, film, and fiction. His plays include The Sound Inside and Red Light Winter, and his novels include The Year of Endless Sorrows. He also wrote and directed the film Winter Passing, starring Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell. In recent years, Rapp took on a very different kind of challenge: adapting S.E. Hinton’s classic novel The Outsiders into a Broadway musical, which opened in 2023 and went on to win multiple Tony Awards.

In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the decade-long process of turning a beloved coming-of-age novel into a stage production. Rapp describes how the show evolved through years of drafts, workshops, and creative experimentation, and how the team worked to balance the story’s emotional extremes while honoring the spirit of Hinton’s original book.

“It was important for [The Outsiders] to be as brutal as it was tender, as funny as it was grim,” he says. “Tragedy and beauty — they both have to speak equally.”

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