Theater Review: Mary Louise Parker in a brilliant new play about death and creation.

The Sound Inside

Written by Adam Rapp

Directed by David Cromer

Starring Mary Louise Parker and Will Hochman

Studio 54 Manhattan

December 12, 2019

Adam Rapp (b. 1958) is an American playwright and novelist best known for a small collection of intimate interpersonal dramas and novels (young adult, graphic, and adult). The Sound Inside, an intense, beautiful two-character play from 2018, shows a keen sense of plotting, nuanced dialogue, and using speech to reveal unconscious or repressed feelings of the actors. While on the surface this production was a star vehicle for Mary Louise Parker (The West Wing, Weeds, Grand Canyon, Fried Green Tomatoes), it is one of those rare plays that transcends the actors and stage technique to immerse you in a gripping personal drama, a sort of emotional cocoon from which you emerge 90 minutes later on the streets, a bit disoriented.

The play centers on Bella, a writing professor at Yale. She is moderately satisfied with her career, if not with her personal life (single, failed relationships), and is a bit cynical about students and society, but in a warm, funny way without bitterness. We find out that she is now dealing with a serious, possibly fatal illness. While the play starts as a monologue, we soon see the entrance of Christopher, the single other character. He’s a curious, earnest, and slightly disturbed freshman student in her class who violates protocol by coming to her office without an appointment, so she can critique his developing new novella. He violates boundaries, asks personal questions of her, even spits on her floor, versions of boundary-averse student behavior that many of us have seen in students the last 15 years or so. The initial jousting between them is beautifully performed by the actors, with a mix of authoritarianism (rules, protocols), adolescent hero worship, mutual talent admiration, and a repressed if real sexual tension. This mix is familiar to anyone who works with young students. Bella admires Christopher’s developing novella, written during the days of their meetings. She thinks his work is honest, personal, and vulnerably honest, and one gets the sense that this sort of intimacy is missing from her life. When Bella violates norms by extending this jousting to dinner outside the office, we think we know where this is going, i.e. a Graduate- like setup with sexual tension between a neurotic younger guy and an experienced older woman. But here is where the playwright surprises us. (WARNING, SPOILER ALERT..SKIP TO NEXT PARAGRAPH BELOW PICTURE IF YOU WILL SEE THE PLAY). Bella has other things in mind for Christopher, though. She has no desire to die under medical intervention for her cancer, and has gathered supplies online for self-administered suicide. But she needs a “buddy” to do the injections. In a remarkable scene, she shows both her vulnerability, trust, and perhaps love for Christopher by asking him to do this grim task. Strikingly he agrees if she reads the final draft of his novella, creating a link between the emotive content of the two acts—creation and death. As it turns out, her death does not happen, and we later find out that he has apparently committed suicide in a manner consistent with the lead character in his novella, by lying down on the frozen Quad at Yale and freezing to death. Bella has an unexpected recovery from her supposedly fatal cancer, and seems both physically and emotionally changed, although we do not know where her life will go, and, brilliantly, we now realize that the whole play is a retrospective recounting of these events by a woman who has undergone this recovery. But there is no easy or obvious rebirth here. People don’t really change that much, and we are left to draw our own conclusions about how she has changed (or not).

The play’s resonances between creation and destruction, fact, personal experience and writing, responsibility and carnality are handled very subtly and deftly by Mr. Rapp. There is no shouting, no hyperbole. The direction and acting were unified and consistently excellent, all on a blank stage, often in darkness with spotlighting of the characters. It made for challenging and vulnerable acting performances for both actors, with Ms. Parker’s role an instant classic. I would describe the play as an equally insightful journey into human relationships as was Pinter’s Betrayal, but with more American informality and more warmth. There was equally virtuosic handling of language and emotion, so The Sound Inside is a play that I hope will endure and be performed regularly.