Playwright Adam Rapp on Building a World of Adolescent Extremes for The Outsiders
The Outsiders was published in 1967, the year before Adam Rapp was born, but he vividly remembers devouring S.E. Hinton's now-classic YA novel in his dorm room at military school. The tale of the orphaned Curtis brothers and their "Greaser" friends, narrated by 14-year-old Ponyboy, struck a nerve with Rapp, the eldest child of a working-class single mother. Almost four decades after he first encountered the novel, th…