Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside is an odd play. It’s about people who may or may not exist and things that may or may not have happened. It’s a story being told about a story being told about a story being told.
Confused? Maybe, maybe not.
After a Tony Award-winning run on Broadway in 2019, it had its West Coast premier just three years ago at Marin Theatre Company. It returns to the North Bay with a Left Edge Theatre production running at The California in Santa Rosa through June 7.
It opens with a 15-minute monologue delivered in the third-person by Bella Baird (Ashley Kennedy). Bella’s a single, solitary, middle-aged woman from a family with a history of health problems. She’s a Yale University Professor of Creative Writing and a book collector. We also learn she has her own health problems
The use of third-person narration to start the show might lead one to think they were attending a staged reading, and the length of the opening monologue might give the impression it’s a one-person show.
But soon a second character is introduced. Christopher Dunn (Nic Moore) is a student in one of Bella’s classes of whom she took note one day after an uncharacteristic outburst from him. He later shows up unannounced at Bella’s office. He’s an intense young man, one who refuses to communicate via email and rages against modern technology and culture. Christopher eventually admits to Bella that he likes her class and is writing a novel.
Soon a relationship develops, at first between mentor and student, but eventually to a much deeper level. Their relationship does not go where one might fear it goes. It actually goes to a much, much darker place.
Or does it? The question of what is ‘real’ and what is fictional is mirrored by Argo Thompson’s set design which mixes the practical and the abstract.
Director Jenny Hollingworth gets two strong performances from her cast. Kennedy and Moore are well-matched as the protagonists and bring conviction and doubt to their characters and the story. Moore smartly shades a character that could come off one-note while Kennedy allows for Bella’s dark humor to somewhat offset the building tension.
That tension, however, is broken with the insertion of an intermission at the show’s halfway point. The 90-minute play was originally presented without an intermission, which forced its audience to deal with the show’s twists and turns without the ‘benefit’ of a break for analysis or discussion.
While I think it plays better that way, it’s still a very interesting show; one that doesn’t go where you expect it and doesn’t tie everything up with a pretty bow.
Left Edge Theatre’s ‘The Sound Inside’ runs through June 7 at The California Theatre. 528 7th Street, Santa Rosa. Wed – Fri, 7:30pm; Sat., 1pm. $11–$44. 707.664.7529. leftedgetheatre.com
