Essential Self-Defense

This play from the Pulitzer Prize finalist is “an entertaining tale of fear and loathing in midwestern America” (The New Yorker).

Obie Award–Winning Playwright

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.

“As the ambiguous antihero of a stylized post–September 11 work about love and safety, Yul is a fascinating figure . . . Rapp was born to wrestle words to the page and then to the stage; he has a love of language and a zest for his characters’ lives.” —⁠Time Out New York