Theater: “The Sound Inside”

Adam Rapp’s dark Broadway debut drama comes to the Pasadena Playhouse

There’s very little plot in playwright Adam Rapp’s two-character monologue The Sound Inside, which marked Rapp’s Broadway debut. This orally driven cornucopia of literary references—centered upon Fyodor Dostoevsky and including Faulkner, Hemingway and Salinger—might seem dubious. The prospect of listening to a Yale University writing professor narrate a tale of encountering a difficult student—breaking the wall to address the audience during her teacher-student dialogues—easily could end up being pompous, stilted and pretentious.

Rapp’s 90-minute intellectual mystery can be too abstract. It’s nonetheless a moving portrayal of a middle-aged novelist and the writer in whom she ultimately chooses to confide. The student, convincingly played by South Pasadena native Anders Keith, who’ll appear as Dr. Frasier Crane’s nephew in this fall’s new version of Frasier, delivers clues about certain plot twists to come. NYPD Blue and Judging Amy actress Amy Brenneman portrays the Yale teacher and hers is the more demanding role.

Brenneman aces the part. So does Keith. Evoking My Dinner with Andre, and without being infected by today’s predominant nihilism, with a touch of Hitchcock’s Rope, The Sound Inside puts the professor’s plain life and personality front and center with neither self-pity nor self-contempt. Many of these talky, female-driven stage vehicles do. By weaving the duo’s shared literary values—expressing dark, serious themes with wit, humor and economy—with a psycho-sexual cat and mouse interplay, director Cameron Watson dramatizes cascading issues (despair, suicide, cancer) that alternately build and ease tension. The result sneaks up and jolts or moves you.

It’s not that you don’t see twists coming—on the contrary, major twists add up if you think—and it doesn’t afford an overwrought or overpowering sense of emotion. Given today’s culture, and a pointed two-year reference by the teacher character, The Sound Inside draws upon what’s been locked down during the two-year pandemic fiasco or cataclysm, depending on your viewpoint, and gauges the innermost darkness within one’s soul. Director Watson—who’s directed I Never Sang for My Father, I Capture the Castle and Picnic as well as writing and directing Miramax’s Our Very Own starring Allison Janney (Mom)—and Rapp do this with strokes of humor and warmth.

With Tesshi Nakagawa’s simple and elegant scenic design, Danyele Thomas’s costumes and perfect lighting by Jared Sayeg (A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park with George, Ragtime), this dark, sometimes sorrowful, sometimes soulful and occasionally humorous puzzle comes together. The Sound Inside dramatizes what it means to be an intellectual—in particular, a modern, not a new, intellectual—in the blackening out of today’s civilized world. Accordingly, it’s as dark as you ought to suppose. And not without mining and showing, even holding somewhat dear, what makes the rational mind tick.

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The Sound Inside at the Pasadena Playhouse