Author: Adam Rapp
Year: 2013
Geography: Americas > Northern America > United States of America
Synopsis: The Hallway Trilogy traces a decaying New York hallway through past, present, and future, revealing human suffering, disconnection, and decay across generations in a dark meditation on society’s moral collapse.
This trilogy contains three coherent parts：
a) Rose (Part I of The Hallway Trilogy) is set in a grimy Lower East Side tenement hallway on November 28, 1953—the day after Eugene O’Neill’s death. A delusional young actress named Rose arrives, believing O’Neill lives in apartment #10. Her presence unravels the lives of lonely, displaced tenants, revealing themes of obsession, mental illness, and postwar alienation. A haunting, bleakly poetic tale of longing, identity, and emotional decay in McCarthy-era America.
b) Paraffin (Part 2 of The Hallway Trilogy) takes place during the 2003 New York City blackout. In the same decaying tenement hallway, a pregnant woman, Margo, navigates a toxic love triangle with her heroin-addicted husband Denny and his bitter, disabled brother Lucas, a war veteran. As darkness descends, buried tensions erupt into violence, revealing haunting echoes of the past and the lingering ghost of Rose from 50 years before. Desire, addiction, and disillusionment blaze in candlelight.
c) Nursing (Part 3 of The Hallway Trilogy) is set in 2053, in a disease-free dystopia. A former tenement is now a “Museum of Disease,” where the public watches Lloyd Boyd be infected with archaic plagues. As he suffers behind glass, tended by a deranged nurse, the play explores voyeurism, dehumanization, and the loss of empathy.
Publication: Rapp, A. (2013 2021). Rose. In The Hallway Trilogy (pp. x–61). : Theatre Communications Group.
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