Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside is an interesting departure from what most plays I’ve seen recently are trying to achieve. Its set is minimal—just a bench on one side acting as a synecdoche for a larger park, and a table and chairs playing the roles of office, kitchen, and dormitory. The rest of the set is brought to life through lighting changes and the rich, eloquent, and expositional dialogue and monologue, written by Rapp and brought to life by Lindsay Anderson, playing the role of Yale University creative writing professor Bella Baird.
The sheer magnitude of how many lines Anderson had to commit to memory and spit out, rapid-fire, at the audience during numerous soliloquies was staggering, and I found myself wondering more than once how many times she had run these lines in the mirror; the delivery, while not completely flawless—there were a few stumbles and pregnant pauses, typical for a pre-opening-night preview showing—was still far better than most of us could have done.
The character of Bella Baird edged her way deftly along the edge of being a trope, the grandiloquent Ivy League English professor, without ever falling into that trap. The poignant insights offered through the aforementioned soliloquies, as well as some of the more questionable choices made by the character, kept her safely in the realm of the believable, and Anderson’s almost conspiratorial connection to the audience helped to seal the deal.
Joining Anderson on stage was Dawson Rutledge in the role of Bella’s young student Christopher Dunne, who also filled the role very well. Although his stage time was far less, and the main character was inarguably Bella, Rutledge did a bang-up job of being the boyishly-good-looking-but-slightly-unsettling student that gets, shall we say, entangled with the professor.
This play, like much of Rapp’s work, keeps you guessing until the end and is full of melancholy and an introspective look at the choices we face in life, as well as the promises we make and sometimes must break. However, much like life itself, there is hilarity, as well as genuine and highly relatable moments of comedy sewn throughout.
The Sound Inside is mostly a character study focused on Bella, as she catalogues the successes and failures of her life to date before meeting a student who frustrates and beguiles her. As the relationship between the two transforms and pushes the envelope of scholastic propriety, Christopher spells out his ideas for a novel that ominously resemble what could be a real-life crime, the details of which are eerily close to what Bella knows of Christopher’s own life. Bella, for her part, faces the crushing weight of a decision that must be made, and weighs the pros and cons of whether or not to bring her strange but brilliant student into her confidences. She ultimately must decide whether or not she can ask for Christopher’s assistance in an immense and irrevocable undertaking.
How much can you ask of another person? This is the question The Sound Inside grapples with, and it stuck with me long after the curtains closed.
The Sound Inside
Various times, until Saturday, October 10
$12 student tickets, Theatre Inconnu
theatreinconnu.com