A dark human story
TheaterWorks’ production of deep, disturbing drama ‘The Sound Inside’ a theater/film hybrid success
TheaterWorks latest production, of Adam Rapp’s dour, suspenseful student/ teacher drama “The Sound Inside,” spins a wordy, deliberately literary two-character play into a dark human story that sounds crisp and clean but also has an undeniable visual impact.
The production pairs filmmaker Pedro Bermúdez with TheaterWorks’ producing artistic director Rob Ruggiero to explore the boundary between theater and film.
“The Sound Inside” is not splashy or sensational. It’s subdued and soft-spoken. The production’s power comes from sensitivity, from subtle gestures and expressions, from slight changes in where the actors are standing. Like theater.
Maggie Bofill plays Yale English professor Bella Baird and Ephraim Birney is her brash student Christopher Dunn. Neither has been in a TheaterWorks show before, but Birney’s mother Constance Shulman has (and was part of an anniversary celebration at the theater a few years ago), while Bofill appeared locally in “A Doll’s House, Part Two” at the Long Wharf Theatre last year.
The teacher and the student are kindred spirits, pining for a pre-Twitter world when great writing was long and and rich and widely appreciated. They’re passionate about the same Faulkner and Dostoevsky novels. More than that, they admire each other’s writing. They both see themselves as misunderstood loners, and they also share some dark visions of humankind in general. Their discussions range from their inability to hold onto friendships and relationships to thoughts of mortality. Will their much-praised-by-each-other works outlive them?
The TheaterWorks version pushes the intellectual, literary angle, but shows you how the character’s talents and passions can wear them out. The most impressive aspect of this production is how well it telegraphs the vulnerability of these tormented souls.
The story is mostly told by Bella, so she does a lot of talking directly to the camera. But her relationship to that camera changes. When Christopher begins to describe the plot of Bella’s novel, he gets to address the camera directly. At one point they both turn to the audience at the same time.
Those moments are a good example of “The Sound Inside” wanting to be both a theatrical experience and a filmic one. You can imagine exactly how this would play on the TheaterWorks stage, and you’re also thankful for video enhancements that deepen the drama without distracting from it. There’s none of the cliched “opening up” of the script which happens with so many stage-to-screen adaptations. This is Rapp’s play, with its careful pacing and listenclose confessions and self-analyses, given a chance to breathe in restrained circumstances.
Some of Bella and Christopher’s putdowns of contemporary society, from Twitter to literary criticism, sound more memorized than natural, but that’s more the playwright’s problem than the actors’, and it’s an open question whether Rapp may be intending to have some of the dialogue sound like it was written down or predigested. Much of the play lightly mocks academia, and how writers present themselves and see themselves.
For New Haveners, some lines indisputably do not ring true. Even the most ivy-tower-bound Yalie wouldn’t describe New Haven Green as “a public park near campus,” and if you wanted to reference a locally resonant bar where a professor might go regularly drown her sorrows, Jack’s Steakhouse would not be it. “The Sound Inside” purports to take place “right now,” but it has Bella meeting someone at the Irish pub Anna Liffey’s, which closed in 2017, a year before the play premiered. Small points, perhaps, but enough to upend the very familiarity they’re meant to underscore.
Hyperlocal quibbles aside, thanks to Ruggiero’s and Bermúdez’s often understated, subtle and graceful co-directorial flourishes, this is a precious play that has been made palatable for online consumption without cheapening or overpowering it.
“The Sound Inside” is the sort of intense small-cast relationship drama that has thrived on the pre-COVID TheaterWorks stage. It’s not easy to adapt these particular strengths to a flat small screen, and by taking that mission seriously, TheaterWorks has made “The Sound Inside” a resounding success.
”The Sound Inside” by Adam Rapp, co-directed by Rob Ruggiero and Pedro Bermúdez and produced by TheaterWorks Hartford, streams through April 30. A special “Pop-Up” screening, where “behind-the-scenes insight and trivia will appear on your screen throughout the show,” is April 29 at 7:30 p.m. ASL interpretation available. $25. twhartford.org.