The Sound Inside

The Cultch to November 24, 2024
Tickets from $29 at 604-251-1363 or www.thecultch.com

Posted November 17, 2024

Finally, here’s a play that’s mysterious, riveting, enigmatic, literary and layered. A play about the intersection between life, art and reality. Do we even know, for sure, what happens in Adam Rapp’s award-winning The Sound Inside, brought to the Cultch by all day breakfast theatre (newly founded by Kerry Sandomirsky) in association with The Search Party (under the artistic direction of Mindy Parfitt)? It’s as much about how the story is told as what it’s about.

In the play, Bella Baird (Sandomirsky) is a 53-year-old tenured creative writing professor at Yale with a couple of novels in her past. She hasn’t written anything for 17 years. Why? We don’t know. The character addresses us directly off the top and hopes we are “friendly” and/or “merciful.” And she proceeds to talk to us about herself; she is, she says “unremarkable”, unmarried, an only child whose mother died a lingering death from cancer, a self-described, “whore for first editions.” Reading and collecting books is her passion. “Loving a book”, she tells us, “is like having an affair.” Sandomirsky is elegantly sexy – the kind of sexy that looks great in a silk blouse and a baggy cardigan paired with chunky leather boots. The kind of sexy that a simple line, “Would you like to join me for dinner – my treat?”, suggests so much more when Sandomirsky says it. She has a warmth, a vulnerability, a caring quality about her that makes her perfect in the role of Bella.

As Bella, Sandomirsky sits at a table with a yellow note pad in which she makes notes, crosses out, rewrites, reconsiders, pauses. And then she tells us about Christopher, a freshman in her writing class, who turned up outside office hours without an appointment, for which she chastises him. Jacob Leonard, as Christopher, then enters the scene and with his entrance a sense of menace is introduced. Also the possibility of sex. He asks why she is single and when she asks how he knows, he replies that she is, “conspicuously alone.”  When she challenges him about failing to make an appointment online, he says, “I really don’t do that. It’s not my style” followed by an explosive rant about rules and technology.  He spits on the floor in front of her. But he comes back again the next day. Bella is interested.

Jacob Leonard, a fairly tall guy, brings an intriguing edge to his character, a kind of lonely sadness mixed with what could be a potential for violence. His Christopher is the walking wounded: troubled, intense, gifted and angry and he is writing a novella about a character named Christopher. Ah.

The Sound Inside shifts from Bella telling us about her relationship with Christopher to real-time enactments of their interaction with each other and then back to her. Then she goes back to making notes in the yellow pad. She continues to cross lines out. To pause. To reconsider.

Christopher reads to us from her first novel which he loves. He reads to us from the novella he’s writing which she greatly admires. They drink wine. They laugh. They talk. But The Sound Inside moves inexorably to what, somehow, feels like tragedy but not the one we expect.

Parfitt’s vision and direction are flawless: a table, two chairs, a rug, two glasses, some old wooden file drawers. Set design is Peter Wilds’ with lighting by Hina Nishioka. We are drawn along wondering where we are going, how will it end; dread and eroticism in equal parts hang in the air.  Love and death. Images of snow occur and recur. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment weaves its way in and out. And we are hooked: where are these two going? What will be their story?

Or is their story not a story at all but the playwright Adam Rapp’s thoughts about creativity? Where do stories come from? “Listen to the sound inside, listen to the sound inside, listen to the sound inside, listen to the sound inside, listen to the sound inside”, Bella says five times in rapid succession. Is that what the creative process – art, music, literature, theatre – is all  about: the artist mining the sound inside?  And then as witnesses, do we make meaning through our own reciprocal act of imagination?

Interesting ideas, framed in a mystery: two characters bringing us to an understanding if not a narrative resolution.

Theatre is alive and well at the Cultch. Prepare to be excited.