The Sound Inside premiered at The Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts in 2018. Adam Rapp’s 27^th play, it was the first to transfer to Broadway, playing Studio 54 with the same cast and creative team. Now director Stella Reid and her (yes) stellar creative team have mounted a riveting production in Wellington, at Circa One.

In her programme note, Reid reveals she found the play in the wake of “a pandemic enforced arts hibernation”, in the face of an incoming “government that doesn’t recognise how stories contribute to wellbeing”, while “wondering what the point of making stories was at all.” She notes that stories are threatened by misinformation (and disinformation) and AI’s Large Language Models, which “provide terrifying sanitised ‘versions’ of paragraphs that mimic us without saying anything. There is no voice behind the thing. The words don’t speak.” In contrast this play spoke to her and wouldn’t leave her alone.

It is perhaps inevitable that a prolific writer – of plays, novels and screenplays – who has also taught at the Yale School of Drama, would eventually write about writing stories. In the proverbial nutshell, The Sound Inside is the inside story of Ivy League writing professor Bella Baird’s shock discovery of her medical condition, her growing fascination with a somewhat insular student, Christopher Dunn, and …

Mostly narrated by Bella, with Christopher inserting the odd outside-looking-in comment, The Sound Inside seamlessly drifts in and out of present action that is recollected from her point of view. Indeed she places herself from the start, “standing in front of an audience of strangers” wondering if we’re friendly … It’s a clever way of forming a bond and establishing a foundation of ‘reality’ from which questions will arise about what is factual and what is fictional.

The initial focus is on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Other works name-checked include Samuel Beckett’s Watt, Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine … Depending on our familiarity with them, these may or may not add clues concerning the style and content of the unfolding story.

Within the stories of Bella, Christopher, and their evolving relationship, the novel Christopher is working on develops to the point where he feels the story is writing him … Then there’s the “under-appreciated” novel Bella wrote years ago that is “almost out of print” … Meanwhile, the question of what exactly is happening between this singular senior woman and solitary young man remains ever-present.

“When you see something powerfully acted on stage,” Rapp said in a conversation with a fellow playwright (2007), “it hits a nerve in the way music hits a nerve … Watching someone twelve feet from you falling in love or being abused … There’s something raw about that experience that you don’t get from film or TV.”[1] The Sound Inside certainly stands as a play that has to be seen live.

Dulcie Smart draws us into the core of Bella’s being right from the start. No matter how discursive her stream of conscious thought becomes, we hang on every word, trusting every detail of her story to have purpose and meaning. Whether she is objectively appraising or subjectively experiencing, we are with her all the way.

Kieran Charnock also inhabits the role of the more elusive Christopher completely, compelling us to seek – along with Bella – the truths of who he is, why that’s so, and how that informs his writing. Is he drawing from experience, exercising his imagination or formulating his future? And what effect do Bella’s responses and subsequent actions have? Where does responsibility lie …?

A well-known writing exercise, set by Bella in which she also participates, may well be the trigger for setting Christopher’s fate in motion. It also manifests the words that give this play its title. The build-up to the morally challenging favour Bella asks of Christopher is as inexorable as it is shocking – and cannot be disclosed here. Suffice to say it raises the question of what plane of existence Bella is on as narrator of her story and his. 

The design challenges are mostly met with alacrity. Meg Rollandi’s production design ingeniously blends a snow-flecked field, Bella’s office, her living area, her kitchen table which doubles as one in a steakhouse, her bedroom – which doubles as a motel room … Natasha James’ lighting design judiciously picks out salient elements and enhances the sense of subjective reality … Thomas Arbor’s sound design sometimes enhances and at other times intrudes on our immersion in the story. Together they manifest highly dramatic moments.

As for the final image …

The unseen hands of technical operator Rebekah de Roo ensure the flow of Adam Rapp’s script, as manifested through Stella Read’s fluid direction, is seamless, leaving us free to empathise, enquire and muse, during and after this entrancing play.

(I had thought this production would be indescribable, given the danger of spoilers, but …)

[Photos by Lewis Ferris]

Footnote:

For many at this opening night, it was a ‘welcome back to Wellington’ to Dulcie Smart, who loomed large in the Wellington scene before departing for Germany in 1991 – after playing Mary Brenham in Timberlake Wertenbeker’s Our Country’s Good at Taki Rua-The Depot, where she also played Betsheb in Louis Nowra’s The Golden Age (1988).

At Downstage she played Desdemona (opposite George Henare) in Othello (1989), and Anna in No Orchids For Miss Blandish, by Robert David MacDonald, and Masha In Chekhov’s The Seagull (1980).

At Circa she was Anna in Lanford Wilson’s Burn This (1989) and Edward/Victoria in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1983).

For more, including an account of Dulcie’s rich and varied life, click this.

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[1] Gionfriddo, Gina; Adam Rapp (November 2007). “Peering in at the Zoo: Adam Rapp and Gina Gionfriddo on American Theater”. The Brooklyn Rail.

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