Playwright Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside is an ambitious, literate mystery.
For me, it’s about art and reality, loneliness and responsibility. But one of the beauties of the play is that it will be interpreted differently depending on what individual audience members bring to it. It will also be understood differently depending on the angle of approach taken by its actors. All of this speaks to the play’s sophistication and begins to explain why it can hold audiences rapt for an unbroken ninety minutes.
Before I go any further, let me also say that this production from all day breakfast theatre in association with The Search Party is exquisite.
The Sound Inside is a two-hander. Bella Lee Baird (Kerry Sandomirsky), who has published “two slim volumes of short stories” and “an underappreciated novel”, is a 53-year-old professor of creative writing at Yale University, where she teaches an undergraduate course called Reading Fiction for Craft. Early on, Bella talks about Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in which the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov, who is a student, murders two unscrupulous women and justifies his crimes by reasoning that he’ll be able to do good with their wealth. But guilt devours him.
Directly addressing the audience in her first monologue, Bella wonders about the nature of her viewers: “Are they easily distracted, or will they hear this woman out?” Are they friendly? Merciful? She seems to be asking, in advance, for forgiveness.
Then her student, Christopher Dunn (Jacob Leonard), enters her office, bringing his own variations on vulnerability and threat. Christopher is writing a novel and, in his eagerness to share his work with Bella, he’s as uncertain as any teenager. But, when Bella says that he needs to book an appointment to talk to her next time, he explodes, ranting about the tyranny of the university systems — and he spits on her floor.
Bella and Christopher are both lonely. They admire each other’s writing. They become close. She is living with stomach cancer and a low likelihood of survival.
What immoral acts can loneliness provoke people to commit? What percentage of storytelling is fiction? Explaining why she is single, Bella says that she has harboured the unlikely dream that “Someday, I’d find a partner I could read with.” Assessing Christopher’s work, she says, “You have a nice amount of dread simmering.”
Sandomirsky approaches the text like she’s spontaneously translating, discovering fresh meaning in every word. Her nuanced, naturalistic work is a masterclass. Impressively, Leonard holds his own as Christopher: mostly understated, sometimes passionate, always intelligent. For the most part, Leonard’s Christopher is an eccentric nerd. In other productions I’ve read about, Christopher is played as more overtly threatening, which would tip the perceptual scales in terms of the play’s climactic plot development, which I won’t reveal.
Once again, director Mindy Parfitt, who is the artistic director of The Search Party, has assembled an exemplary team. There is a set of cues in Hina Nishioka’s lighting design in which three spotlights appear on the floor: stylistically it’s unlike anything else in the show and it feels out of place. For the most part, though, Nishioka’s design is smoothly, moodily evocative. And Owen Belton’s meditative, melancholy sound design fits the text perfectly.
Because The Sound Inside is a series of puzzles within puzzles and its tone is more philosophical than emotional, it engaged my head more than my heart. But both characters speak as if they’re writing prose — not self-consciously but fluently, evocatively — which brings considerable pleasure, as does being in the presence of such skilled acting. And those puzzles and the questions they raise aren’t just intriguing, they’re substantial.
THE SOUND INSIDE by Adam Rapp. Directed by Mindy Parfitt. Produced by all day breakfast theatre in association with The Search Party. Running the Vancity Culture Lab in The Cultch until November 24. Tickets and information.
PHOTO CREDIT: Photo of Kerry Sandomirsky and Jacob Leonard by David Cooper
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