Review of The Sound Inside, TheaterWorks
Adam Rapp’s tour de force play The Sound Inside is the kind of play that TheaterWorks in Hartford has a knack for. A two-person drama on a slow burn, where revelations come slowly and might be fictions, where much depends on controlling the tone, which is matter-of-fact, and the pacing, with is stately even as the story becomes increasingly wrenching.
Directed by Rob Ruggiero and Pedro Bermúdez and filmed on the stage at TheaterWorks, this rendering suits very well the airless space of Rapp’s play where everything that occurs is narrated or recalled. As Bermúdez says in the press release: “It's one camera, one shot at a time…we looked at building this world moment by moment – so that the camera itself had to become the audience in a very active way.” Yes, audience and almost a character, particularly in scenes where actors lock the camera with their gaze in direct address. Watching it, you feel pulled in, controlled by that special relationship a camera can have with a close-up.
That mostly happens with the play’s main character, Bella Baird (Maggie Bofill), a creative writing professor at Yale. Baird takes us into her confidence in the way many a memoirist does—by holding up her experience as a worthy subject of her writing and making her writing a way of interesting us in her experience. There’s a riskiness to the strategy and engaging that risk seems Rapp’s whole point: Bella’s manner can cloy and we have to listen to her because the play is essentially a dramatized monologue. The pay-off, for the playwright, is that we have only Bella’s word (and choice of words) for what occurs, mostly. Even when a scene is staged for us, her narratorial intervention can occur at any moment. And what we see/hear is what she tells/shows us.
Bella is a writing instructor, remember. And the hoariest line in all of the teaching of writing is “show, don’t tell.” At certain moments the play shows, but mostly it tells. Indeed, Rapp seems to get a kick out of rubbing against such dicta, as when Bella, after insisting that there’s no reason to describe any character with anything more than a single detail or phrase, goes on to give a thumbnail sketch of her main character (besides herself): Christopher Dunn (Ephraim Burney). Turns out Chris is that walking cliché of every movie/play/story set in a writing program: the truly gifted, troubled, beguiling, infuriating student author of a first novel.
Where we go from there is into a series of fictions that includes a segment of Bella’s only published novel and a synopsis of Chris’s work in progress, each mysterious and gripping in its own way. Meanwhile, the key elements of Bella’s memoir is her growing despair over her physical condition—she’s been diagnosed with stage 2 cancer and is deemed terminal—and her infatuation with Chris. Those two antagonists—death and love?—meet in a very tense scene late in the play.
What makes this theatrical treatment of prosaic situations work is the very emphatic focus on Bella. She’s a great role and Maggie Bofill renders her as an epitome of calculated nuance. Bella weighs her words, and in speaking to us and looking at us—Bofill’s rapport with the camera is phenomenal—she gauges her words’ effect. We are never not in her world as she composes it, so that even Chris’ outbursts and reticence and arrogance and vulnerability come to us as she sees them. This makes Burney’s role as Chris a difficult one. We’re not sure how much he’s deliberately riffing on Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (the subject of classroom discussion as the class reads Crime and Punishment “for craft”), or how much Bella sees him in that light. In any case, Chris is inspired by Raskolnikov’s violent crime, a moment in the Russian novelist’s tale whose drama—as act, as amoral violation, as artistically achieved scene?—captivates and polarizes the class.
Rapp, with Bella and Chris, is also playing with those themes, and with us. I don’t doubt there are those viewers who will take this play on face value, as a story about a very trying time in a middle-aged author/teacher’s life, an infatuation with a confused but gifted young man, and the way they both reach out to each other in their time of trial. As such, it works, its melodrama tempered by Bella’s thoughtful evocations, all after the fact. But the play is about writing—manifestly—and the story of Chris, in its slippery metamorphoses into his own fiction and into Bella’s, feels as if its groping toward statement, whether imposed by Bella or Rapp, the kind that can only be fully parsed in a creative writing class. My inclination is to let Rapp take the rap.
Strong in presentation, with subtle uses of Billy Bivona’s score and the atmospheric scenic work by Lawrence E. Moten III, lighting by Amith Chandrashaker, and costumes by Alejo Vietti, the collaboration of Ruggiero and Bermúdez is first-rate and not to be missed, especially if you care about the possibilities for streaming theater in our quarantined times. TheaterWorks is showing itself to be a leader in this regard. And this taut and surprising and suspenseful play works beautifully as a showcase of the directors’ method. What we lose in the shared space of theater is matched by a gain in dramatic intimacy that suits the play so well. The craft of The Sound Inside is sound indeed.
The Sound Inside
By Adam Rapp
Directed by Rob Ruggiero and Pedro Bermúdez
Set Design: Lawrence E. Moten III; Costume Design: Alejo Vietti; Lighting Design: Amith Chandrashaker; Original Music Composed & Performed by Billy Bivona; Video Production/Editing: Pedro Bermúdez/Revisionist Films; Audio Mix/Mastering: Matt Bersky/Massive Productions, Inc.; Production Stage Manager: Kate J. Cudworth
Cast: Ephraim Birney; Maggie Bofill
TheaterWorks
April 11-April 30, 2021
Extended to May 9, 2021