THE SOUND INSIDE


Amy Brenneman delivers a bravura performance opposite gifted newcomer Anders Keith in Adam Rapp’s unnerving, electrifying The Sound Inside, a phenomenal season opener for the Tony-winning Pasadena Playhouse.

 Brenneman stars as 50something Yale professor Bella Lee Baird, whose extended opening monolog recalls her brief, long-ago stab at literary fame and fortune (she once penned a well-reviewed but now largely forgotten young adult novel), the loner’s life she’s grown accustomed to, and, most significantly, her mother’s grisly death from the most aggressive of stomach cancers.

Now diagnosed with her own Stage 2 abdominal cancer (not neurofibromatosis like her mother, but just “good old-fashioned cancer” she reassures us), Bella seems particularly ill-inclined to welcome the unscheduled office visit of young whippersnapper Christopher Dunn (Keith), a student in her Reading Fiction For Craft class whose nonchalance about showing up without an appointment bodes ill for today’s one-on-one.

So does the aspiring novelist’s considerable ego and chutzpah. (In a class discussion of the pivotal murder scene form Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment, Christopher declares with supreme confidence, “Someday I’m going to write a moment like that.”)

Still, if there’s anything likely to appeal to a writer like Bella, it’s a way with words (a talent Christopher most definitely has), that and a student who’s more than capable of holding his own when he gets to sparring with his professor (a trait young Christopher Dunn also possesses in spades).

Their teacher-student bond gets even stronger when Christopher begins describing the novel he’s now writing, and it becomes clear that said novel’s characters and plot twists may well prove as unsettling as Bella’s must have been to its young adult readers.

Are Bella and Christopher heading towards something more intimate (and inappropriate) than a simple teacher-student relationship, or will her young protégé fulfill a far different need in her life now that doctors have given her a less than 20% chance of survival, even with aggressive chemotherapy?

This is just one reason The Sound Inside is guaranteed to keep audiences rapt throughout its intermissionless ninety minutes.

And lest you think you know where Rapp’s acclaimed 2019 Broadway play is going, rest assured that you don’t, as its last five or ten minutes make abundantly clear.

Like his two protagonists, playwright Rapp has a gift for language, one that yields equal parts audience rewards and acting challenges, particularly to whoever undertakes the bear of a part that is Bella, a character whose mix of narration and back-and-forths with Christopher give her the lion’s share of lines in a play rich with words.

It would seem to present added challenges to an actress best known for her work in episodic TV where takes are short and line flubs only add to the bloopers reel, but it’s a challenge the dynamic, magnetic stage vet Brenneman is more than up to.

Her prickly, imperious, vulnerable Bella is a star turn finely honed by Cameron Watson, who proves himself as adept an “actor’s director” as he is a master of visually compelling staging.

And what a find Watson has made in South Pasadena High School’s very own Keith, just graduated from Juilliard, soon to star as Kelsey Grammer’s adult son in the upcoming Frasier reboot, and about as talented a stage actor as any audience or director could wish for, giving Brenneman as good as he gets as a young man whose considerable bravado masks a sensitive, troubled soul.

The Sound Within could not be more stunningly designed, from the sliding rice-paper walls of Tesshi Nakagawa’s striking set, to the breathtaking visual effects their translucence allows lighting designer Jared A. Sayeg to achieve, to the drama-and-suspense-enhancing underscoring created by ace sound designer Jeff Gardner, and Danyele E. Thomas’s costume choices are every bit as fine.

Jenny Slattery is associate producer. Alyssa Escalante is stage manager and David S. Franklin is assistant stage manager. Casting is by Ryan Bernard Tymensky, CSA (RBT Casting). Brad Enlow is technical director and production supervisor. Davidson & Choi Publicity are publicists.

Defying easy description or pigeonholing, Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside is something quite special indeed, and its Pasadena Playhouse debut more than does the playwright proud.

It left me stunned speechless.

Pasadena Playhouse, 39 South El Molino Ave., Pasadena. T
www.pasadenaplayhouse.org

–Steven Stanley
September 10, 2023
Photos: Mike Palma

 

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