'Winter' of his discontent

NEW YORK -- Writer Adam Rapp has long mined the demons of his troubled adolescence, fractured family relations, and career ups and downs to provide thematic and emotional jumping-off points for his plays such as ''Nocturne," which premiered at the American Repertory Theatre in 2000, and the current off-Broadway hit ''Red Light Winter," as well as his popular young adult novels.

Now moving into the realm of film with ''Winter Passing," which opens Friday, Rapp shows no signs of abandoning the formula that has helped make him a success. ''All of my characters are inspired by either someone I know or somewhere inside me that I know," says the strapping, auburn-haired author over breakfast at the Tribeca Grand Hotel in Lower Manhattan on a bright, warm February morning.

Rife with rich, poetic dialogue, Rapp's stories offer harsh worlds strewn with unhinged, self-destructive characters dwelling on the fringe of society and often suffering from disease, drug addiction, or a violent past. Yet his work is also shot through with thick doses of mordant humor.

''I think that if you can make an audience laugh or a reader laugh and seduce them in that way, then you can take them anywhere you want. You can drag them through the mud," he says.

Indeed, in ''Winter Passing," Rapp is reveling in the mire. The story centers on a struggling New York theater actress and emotion-devoid wreck, Reese Holden (played by Zooey Deschanel), who returns home to face the demons of a turbulent childhood.

Estranged from her literary legend parents and haunted by the recent death of her mother (whose funeral she skipped out on), Reese is stumbling through a lonely, detached existence filled with booze, drugs, and empty sex. When a book editor offers her $100,000 to publish a series of her parents' love letters, Reese decides to entertain the offer.

''She's suffering from this thing that I think a lot of people go through in their 20s -- and I certainly did -- where you're fighting this war with numbness," says Rapp, now 37. ''She's medicating by using drugs and alcohol and sex, and, at the same time, she desperately wants to feel something. That's why she's slamming her hand in drawers. She's lost a bit of who she is inside."

Returning to her childhood home in Michigan's Upper Peninsula to retrieve the letters that have been willed to her, Reese finds that her reclusive father, Don Holden (Ed Harris), is in the throes of severe depression and has moved out of the house and into the garage. Meanwhile, a couple of oddball hangers-on -- Shelly (Amelia Warner), Don's former student, and Corbit (Will Ferrell), a shy man-child and one-time Christian rocker -- have taken up residence in the house.

Worse, this new surrogate family, which her father has embraced, leaves Reese feeling like the outsider.

''Going home for me has always been fraught with all kinds of complicated feelings," says Rapp, who is estranged from his father and had a tempestuous relationship with his mother when he was younger (his parents divorced when he was 5). ''I think that when Reese gets home, it does a number on her head, and she becomes curious about her father. She wants to connect in some way and wants to make sense of things."

For Deschanel, portraying Reese was a balancing act. ''Playing such an on-the-edge character is much harder than playing a character who's gone over the edge. Going over the edge is easy," she says, with a laugh. ''But staying on the edge through the whole movie takes a lot more out of you."

Rapp reveals that aspects of Deschanel's character were drawn from an ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth Reaser, now a rising talent on stage and screen (''The Family Stone," ''Stay"). But it was Rapp's own frayed family ties and rocky personal history that provided the emotional blueprint for the characters in the film.

''I think grief sends people into really strange states of isolation," he says. ''When my mother died in 1997, I didn't talk to my sister for two years and I still don't know why. . . . There's this dislocating thing that happens, and it's totally inexplicable at times. So I wanted to speak to that."

Although Rapp comes across as an easygoing Midwesterner, he admits to suffering through a stormy adolescence. His various indiscretions, including stealing hood ornaments off cars, landed him in reformatory school when he was only in fifth grade.

For high school, his mother shipped him off to a military academy. To keep himself out of trouble later on, he concentrated on basketball and schoolwork. (He eventually became a high school and college hoops star, played professionally in Europe, and once tried out for the Detroit Pistons.)

While Rapp battled with bouts of teen angst, his younger brother, Anthony, was establishing himself as a budding child star. Anthony has since become a successful stage and film actor (''Rent," ''A Beautiful Mind"), and his early success helped provide financial support to his working-class family.

But for Adam, his younger brother's talent meant that his interests and aspirations were constantly being challenged.

''When I was in eighth grade, my mom came into the locker room at halftime [of a basketball game] and was like, 'Your brother just got a Broadway play. We're moving to New York tomorrow.' So for me, I was always being uprooted. . . . Home became wherever Anthony had a job.

''We're close now, and we've patched up all that stuff. But for a long time, I did really resent that. And I developed a real disdain for theater because it represented complete chaos for me as a kid. . . . It took me a long time to get over that, but now [theater] is like a sanctuary for me."

Nowhere has Rapp felt more embraced than at the American Repertory Theatre, where founder and former artistic director Robert Brustein became a mentor and a champion of his work.

Indeed, Rapp credits Brustein with helping to launch his fledgling career. During his second year in the playwriting program at Juilliard, Rapp had fallen into a serious funk. He was broke, severely depressed, and had hit a wall creatively and professionally.

''I had done nothing but fail in the theater, and I was thinking about leaving New York. And then out of nowhere -- and I don't know how he got the phone number -- I get a call at my girl-friend's apartment. It was Bob Brustein, and he was like, 'Adam, I just read your play ''Nocturne" and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.' I'll never, ever forget that."

''It was written with such poeticism and power that I knew we had to do it," Brustein says of ''Nocturne." In that single afternoon, the roiling rapids of Rapp's life somehow seemed more navigable. Over the course of the next 2 1/2 years, the ART produced three of Rapp's plays: ''Nocturne," ''Animals and Plants," and ''Stone Cold Dead Serious."

''The minute I met Bob, all he did was nurture me. I'll always be grateful," says Rapp. ''Without him and the ART, I would have no career."

Since then, Rapp's plays have been produced all over the country and have enjoyed both critical and commercial success. He's working as a creative consultant for Showtime's ''The L Word"; his first adult novel, ''The Year of Endless Sorrows," should be released in the coming year; and he's editing his next feature film, ''Blackbird," based on his play about a tragic love affair between a hepatitis-infected young woman and a Gulf War veteran.

While ''Blackbird" features a cast made up mostly of New York theater actors, for ''Winter Passing" Rapp was able to lure major box office draws like multiple Oscar nominee Harris, beloved funny man Ferrell, and rising star Deschanel, who says that it was Rapp's way with words that attracted her to the project.

The first time she met him, the actress says that they sat in the bar of the L'Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills for four hours talking about the film, the characters, and his writing process.

''I think the best writers and directors like Adam find poetry in the strangest places," she says. ''I knew that he would make a good movie, and I just wanted to be a part of it."