Review: Mary-Louise Parker, Resounding in ‘The Sound Inside’

Review: Mary-Louise Parker, Resounding in ‘The Sound Inside’

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — It’s pretty easy to stun an audience into the kind of silence about which people say, “You could hear a pin drop.” Just a well-timed slap will do it.

But there’s a deeper kind of attention in the theater: the kind that comes from withholding the blow. When an audience is focused on what might be coming instead of what already came, you can hear a pin not drop.

That’s the silence — a beautiful hush of dread and wonder — that envelops “The Sound Inside,” Adam Rapp’s astonishing new play now receiving its world premiere, under the masterly direction of David Cromer, at the Williamstown Theater Festival. For its entire 90 minutes you are dying to know what will happen even while hoping to forestall the knowledge.

So is Bella Baird, the 53-year-old fiction writer and Yale professor who narrates much of the play. As the action starts she has received a terrible cancer diagnosis with little chance of survival.

And yet the progress of her disease is just one aspect of the play’s interconnected levels of suspense. While telling us her story, Bella — played by Mary-Louise Parker in a sensationally controlled performance — is at the same time taking notes and trying out phrases for a story she intends to write. It’s about a teacher who has cancer.

So at one level, we are watching Bella create the tale she is in fact delivering.

Into this Möbius strip of a narrative another gradually intrudes, this one about Christopher Dunn, one of Bella’s creative writing students. Christopher, a freshman from Vermont, lacks a social skin, but Bella is at first unable to tell whether he is hostile, troubled or just overstuffed with language that must push its way out in vivid torrents. He calls baristas “New Age, unshowered, tatted-out Hobbits.”

In any case, Christopher (Will Hochman) is also writing a work of fiction that teases the question of autobiography. In it, a Yale freshman from Vermont spends Thanksgiving break in New York City, where something awful ensues. Has this happened to Christopher himself? Will it?

“You have yourself a nice amount of dread simmering,” Bella tells him.

That dread only builds as the two tales start to converge. During office hours — and then over dinner and drinks and more — the two writers start to write each other into their lives.

This could so easily have devolved into something purely abstract and acrobatic. But Mr. Rapp — a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Red Light Winter” — does not take as his model the theatrical work of Tom Stoppard or Michael Frayn, with their games of three-dimensional chess. Rather he draws on a literary tradition that creates narrative only to nibble away at its authority. Woolf and Beckett are name-checked.

But so too are Dostoyevsky and “Old Yeller”; one of the things that makes “The Sound Inside” so thrilling is its full engagement with tragedy. The narrative pyrotechnics do not replace real fire.

This is territory in which Ms. Parker has a great deal of experience, from “Prelude to a Kiss” in 1990 to “Heisenberg” in 2016. By now we know how relentlessly she hounds after the truth of even the most complicated and surreal situations. That skill is tested even further in “The Sound Inside,” which asks her to maintain a solidly corporeal characterization — you never sense that Bella is a concept — while also rendering several crosscutting layers of possibility at once.

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That she achieves all this with perfect clarity and no self-pity, and with her sometimes kooky affectations modulated into an aptly self-deprecating charm, is a mark of Ms. Parker’s maturity and the production’s. Let’s hope she and it come to New York, because the short run at Williamstown closes on Sunday.

Much of the credit goes to Mr. Cromer. Having made a specialty of sepia-toned works suffused with quiet sadness, he adds a new color here.

That color is gray: The scenic design (by Alexander Woodward) and lighting design (by Heather Gilbert) mostly exist at the threshold between barely there and nothing. I often failed to register the trees, snow, handwriting and other bits of projected video, by Aaron Rhyne, until long after they’d actually started to appear. And by then they’d be halfway gone.

That seems to be Mr. Cromer’s organizing principle for the production. He keeps very far ahead of the audience, switching so seamlessly between modes of presentation — scenes are sometimes described, sometimes acted out, sometimes both at once — that you don’t have time to ask too many questions.

If you did, you might begin to wonder why all of Christopher’s threatening traits are front loaded. Is it because, by the middle of the play, Bella has begun to see him differently? Or because the character as written isn’t totally coherent? Mr. Hochman makes a strong case for each element of the difficult role, if not yet for the role overall.

And you might start to ask what the excellent writing, acting and stagecraft are about.

That would be a more profitable line of questioning, because a play like “The Sound Inside,” abjuring sentimentality in its very bones, could never be this affecting without touching on something big.

Perhaps it’s what Christopher, in describing “Crime and Punishment,” calls the great novel’s intention to inspire “moral fascination.”

We don’t much expect that in the theater today, which is so often about sympathy, horror or gift-wrapped lessons. In making no judgments and offering no explanations, “The Sound Inside” forces you to. No wonder the audience is stunned into silence.

Follow Jesse Green on Twitter: @JesseKGreen.

The Sound Inside
Through July 8 at the Williamstown Theater Festival, Williamstown, Mass.; 413-458-3253, wtfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

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