Late October
The
marketing of The Sound Inside is a bit of a fooler (at least it fooled me);
because of the play’s emphasis on physical darkness save for highlighted
playing spaces, and on an implicitly enforced contemplative silence around the play—something beyond the
usual etiquette norm, more akin to being complicit with a mood and tone that
are set atmospherically even before
they are set by the text—you think perhaps you’re in for a psychological
thriller. But Adam Rapp‘s play is
not that at all.
It is, though, a psychological study. It charts the relatively brief
relationship between Bella, a college professor of literature, newly dealing
with a diagnosis of very probably terminal cancer (an as-always excellent and
deceptively simple Mary Louise Parker);
and Christopher, a highly troubled, but also highly gifted student (a portrait
of periodically eruptive neurosis by Will
Hochman). Bella narrates…relatively speaking, she is a fairly complete
character. Christopher never breaks the fourth wall (except once, arguably in a
strange, late moment) and only exists via Bella’s recollection. As much as he
is an enigma to her, he is even a little bit more of an enigma to us. But
there’s enough about him that’s characteristically idiosyncratic enough for a
distinct personality to be on display.
And we get to know Bella with an almost invasive intimacy, so there’s a
precarious balance.
How much there is actually there in
all this can be much debated. You can call the play fragile or slender. You can
consider it thematically rich, or you can come away from it thinking you’ve
only seen a sketch of something. Its title, The
Voice Inside, may refer to what you bring
to it, as much as what its characters consider. (And they do.)
What matters most to this experience…is simply that it is one. The director is David Cromer, and he is of course the
perfect match to the material, because of all the A-list practitioners in the
game today, he is the one most unafraid of silence; the one with nerve enough
to trust extended moments consisting of nothing but context, focused theatrical
intent and audience concentration. All
of which provide significant coin of the realm where The Voice Inside is concerned.
There’s more to say, but to tell it
is to take away from the experience of impressions formed without preparation
or expectation. You know what you need to know, to know if it’s for you. Or
maybe you don’t.
But you know what you need to
know…to know if you need to know more…
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