THEATRE REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2024 | Volume 245

 

Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside is a quiet, tricky two-hander about the relationship between a middle-aged Yale creative writing professor and her first-year student. A sensitive character study filled with literary references and meta-narratives, the play offers its actors a showcase for their talents, and the acting in this finely crafted independent production doesn’t disappoint.

The story is narrated by the professor, Bella Baird (Kerry Sandomirsky), who first presents the audience with her autobiography: 53 years old, childless, never married, “four or five degrees beyond mediocre,” she lives alone. She has published a couple of volumes of short stories and a novel that got little attention. Both her parents died young, her mother from a terrible bout of stomach cancer. Bella herself has recently been diagnosed with Stage 2 stomach cancer.

In contrast to Bella’s matter-of-fact calm, the student who drops into her office unannounced, Christopher Dunn (Jacob Leonard), is jumpy, aggressive, hot-headed. After a few visits they arrive at a kind of détente. Both are loners, both live for books and their own writing. Keen to learn more about him, Bella invites Christopher to dinner. She finds herself physically and emotionally attracted to him, but the play avoids any investigation of the ethics of this teacher- student relationship.

Instead, the plot takes a different kind of leap. Bella decides to end her own life before the cancer does, and she recruits Christopher to give her the necessary injections. How this plays out has its own fascinating trajectory.

The literary meta-narratives with which the plot is embroidered include multiple references to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the novel with which Bella begins her class, as well as the details of Bella’s own novel and a novel that Christopher is writing, which is partly modeled on an art work in Bella’s office. Ultimately, the play itself may be a fictionalization of their lives about which Bella seems to be taking notes.

I enjoyed the cleverness of the interwoven narratives and the elegance of Bella’s own narration, although Rapp can be guilty of over-embroidering her sentences, a literary sin that Bella herself criticizes.

But the acting is fully satisfying. Sandomirsky’s slightly repressed Bella is all calm surfaces but we can feel her sometimes boiling underneath, and she charms us with her self-deprecating humour. Leonard makes Christopher believably quirky, maybe autistic, and certainly at times desperate. Nothing seems cliché about their odd couple, November-May pairing.

Though only ninety minutes without intermission, the production has plenty of time to breathe thanks to Mindy Parfitt’s beautifully controlled direction. At one point Bella makes Christopher mop her office floor after he has spit on it, and the mopping, without dialogue, goes on for perhaps two full minutes.

Making that kind of naturalism work involves a kind of theatrical magic that we rarely see these days.

 

 

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