The Sound Inside

“The Sound Inside is an emotionally layered two-hander in which the process of writing, reading, and analyzing fiction is an inextricable part of how we come to know and care about both characters … A quiet stunner of a play.”

—DAVID ROONEY, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

“Exquisitely written … Rapp’s eloquent language is sometimes meta-theatrical, often poetic, sometimes professorial, pragmatic, intellectual, or wry, and always riveting.”

—DEB MILLER, DC METRO ARTS

“An exquisitely dark and Dostoevskian little play … Rapp is writing about how death usually comes with a sudden awareness of the youth of other people, fellow humans totally unaware of how lucky they are right now, and the rich banquet of possibility that lies ahead.”

—CHRIS JONES, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

“A small-scale, unexpectedly gripping new work … The Sound Inside is a real rarity—a direct, actionless, slim piece that turns out to be uniformly engrossing.”

—MATT WINDMAN, AMNEWYORK

“Deeply affecting and memorable … Rapp’s language is a luxurious blend of literary imagery and rhythm and theatrical nuance and intensity.”

—JEFFREY BORAK, BERKSHIRE EAGLE

“A remarkable psychological mystery … The Sound Inside includes no obvious crimes, no hint of the supernatural or anything else we associate with bump-in-the-night tales. Rapp instead has written an intensely quiet play of two lonely people circling one another … To say we fear the worst is more or less true, but only because we hope for something good and suspect—both from the mood created and the hints dropped—that we’ll be as disappointed as we fear they’ll be.”

—GREG EVANS, DEADLINE

“A quietly riveting character study and exquisitely realized piece.”

—MICHAEL DALE, BROADWAY WORLD

“Rapp is in top form here, creating a tough, dense work that feels more like a recited novella than a traditional drama … A delicate play that’s always one step ahead of its audience—as any good work of fiction should be.”

—DAVID GORDON, THEATERMANIA

“The Sound Inside transmits experiences of solitude, introversion, depression, and the innate desire for human connection.”

—ROSEANN CANE, BERKSHIRE ON STAGE

“An engrossing new American play … The Sound Inside is a potent piece of must-see theater, a magnificent Broadway premiere for Rapp.”

—DEB MILLER, DC METRO ARTS

“Vital, compassionate and often funny … Rapp taps into themes of tragedy and redemption, sacrifice and loss, the bright blaze of artistic creation and the sadness of an unknowable stranger. This intimate drama manages to be both literary and rivetingly theatrical.”

—DAVID ROONEY, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

THE SOUND INSIDE

OTHER BOOKS BY ADAM RAPP AVAILABLE FROM TCG

The Hallway Trilogy

INCLUDES:

Rose

Paraffin

Nursing

THE SOUND INSIDE

A PLAY

Adam Rapp

THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP / NEW YORK / 2019

The Sound Inside is copyright © 2019 by Adam Rapp

The Sound Inside is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc.,

520 Eighth Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights, including but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this book by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the author’s representative: Mark Subias, United Talent Agency, 888 Seventh Avenue, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10106, (212) 659-2600.

Old Yeller, by Fred Gipson, copyright © 1956, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, New York, reissued 2009.

The publication of The Sound Inside by Adam Rapp, through TCG’s Book Program, is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.

ISBN 978-1-55936-977-0 (paperback) / ISBN 978-1-55936-935-0 (ebook)
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Book design and composition by Lisa Govan
Cover design by Mark Melnick

First Edition, November 2019

CONTENTS

PRODUCTION HISTORY

CHARACTERS

1

2

3

4

5

EPILOGUE

THE SOUND INSIDE

PRODUCTION HISTORY

The Sound Inside was commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater (André Bishop, Producing Artistic Director; Adam Siegel, Managing Director; Hattie K. Jutagir, Executive Director of Development and Planning). It had its world premiere at Williamstown Theatre Festival (Mandy Greenfield, Artistic Director) in Williamstown, Massachusetts, on June 27, 2018. It was directed by David Cromer. The scenic design was by Alexander Woodward, the costume design was by David Hyman, the lighting design was by Heather Gilbert, original music and sound design were by Daniel Kluger, the projection design was by Aaron Rhyne; the production stage manager was Dane Urban. The cast was:

This production opened on Broadway at Studio 54 on October 17, 2019. The producers were Jeffrey Richards, Lincoln Center Theater, Rebecca Gold, Evamere Entertainment, Eric Falkenstein, Salman Vienn Al-Rashid, Spencer Ross, Filmnation Entertainment/Faliro House, Jane Bergère, Caiola Productions, Mark S. Golub and David S. Golub, Ken Greiner, Gemini Theatrical Investors, Scott H. Mauro, Jayne Baron Sherman, Jacob Soroken Porter, and Williamstown Theatre Festival. The cast and creative team remained the same, except the production stage manager was Richard A. Hodge.

CHARACTERS

BELLA

CHRISTOPHER

1

Bella, a middle-aged woman, emerges from the darkness.

BELLA

(To the audience) A middle-aged professor of undergraduate Creative Writing at a prestigious Ivy League university stands before an audience of strangers. She can’t quite see them but they’re out there. She can feel them—they’re as certain as old trees. Gently creaking in the heavy autumn air.

Is this audience friendly, she wonders? Merciful? Are they easily distracted? Or will they hear this woman out?

And what about her?

Ironically, she often dissuades her students from describing a protagonist in too fine of detail. Readers only need a few telling clues:

“The countess possesses a shock of white hair.”

“The farmer’s mouth is a shriveled ax wound.”

The only distinguishing characteristics Salinger gives Holden Caulfield are his height and that little patch of gray hair at the side of his head. If you do your authorial job correctly your reader will create the rest of the character.

And in going against her own professorial mandate she describes this woman to said audience of strangers.

Beyond her somewhat forgiving brown eyes, your narrator could be described as unremarkable. In that thorny subjective bureau of classification known as the Looks Department, if she’s being brutally honest with herself, she’d say she’s perhaps four or five degrees beyond mediocre, also known as “sneakily attractive.”

She is the equivalent of a collectible plate mounted to a wall.

*

BELLA

Autumns in New Haven, where the temperature drops so fast it’s as if God is hoarding something; as if he’s keeping a piece of this world for himself. Yes, my God is a man. He’s selfish and smokes a pipe and looks like a perverted eighteenth-century French novelist. My God is a fat man with money who can still get it up. His penis is short and stout and stiff as an old book. My God has gamy breath and gout. My God is basically Honoré de Balzac.

So this is now. Right now. It’s the late fall. There has been early snow, nearly a foot of it, in fact. Records have been broken. One barely remembers the leaves changing.

I’m standing in the center of the New Haven Green, a public park near campus. It’s very cold. There is no wind. The naked trees look palsied and arthritic. It’s that hour of the night when even the most mundane objects seem to possess thought. A guilt-ridden park bench. The serpentine wickedness hiding in a lost scarf.

That lamppost over there knows more about me than most of my students.

I come to this park when I can’t sleep. I talk things out. I use long, heavily embroidered, figurative sentences; the kind of sentences I urge my students to avoid. In this park I’m a Creative Writing hypocrite. I imagine my purple prose evaporating in the cold air above me. Thousands of words disappearing …

So let’s go back in time a bit.

Shortly after the beginning of my tenth tenured year at Yale, sharp stomach pains drove me to the emergency room where I sustained a rupture in my lower intestine. At home I had been sitting in my favorite chair—an overstuffed plaid recliner—rereading James Salter’s Light Years. It’s a book I read every year, often in the fall; that rare work of fiction that continues to reveal new things with each reading. Salter’s meditation on infidelity and love and loneliness … and divorce … and the suburbs and dogs and wine … I don’t even teach the book because, well, because quite honestly it’s so good that it sort of enrages me. Anyway, I was about forty pages into it when I got up to go to the bathroom and was suddenly doubled over in pain. It felt as if I’d been stabbed in the stomach with a hunting knife. Fortunately my cell phone was within arm’s reach and I was able to dial 911. I lost consciousness shortly thereafter. I don’t even remember the paramedics.

A few days later, after recovering from emergency surgery, I underwent a series of tests, which revealed that my stomach was riddled with a constellation of tumors. Yes, they were malignant. And yes, according to the medical center oncologist who shall remain nameless, my cancer was somewhat advanced, well into the Stage Two phase of metastasis.

Here’s some general information:

My name is Bella Lee Baird. I’m fifty-three years old. I was born at Saint Francis Hospital, in Evanston, Illinois. I am healthy. I eat a low-fat, high-fiber diet. I’ve never smoked cigarettes. Over the years I’ve occasionally enjoyed various forms of marijuana but I don’t abuse it. Aside from a bottle of red wine now and then, I’ve never been much of a drinker. I do own a thirty-year-old single-malt scotch. And I do eat meat, but only a few times a month and exclusively the six-ounce filet over at Jack’s Bar & Steakhouse on College Street. I’ve never so much as suffered a broken bone.

I have no children and I’ve never been married. Like many single, self-possessed women who’ve managed to find solid footing in the slippery foothills of higher education, I’ve been accused of being a lesbian. And a witch. And a maker of Bulgarian cheese. And a collector of cat calendars.

Both my parents are dead. My father suffered a fatal heart attack at sixty-two and I’ll get to my mother in a minute. I have no brothers or sisters. I live in faculty housing. I don’t own property. I’m essentially a walking social security number with a coveted Ivy League professorship and a handful of moth-bitten sweaters.

Besides those sweaters, my greatest claim to this life has been my book collection, which I’ve been carefully curating since my early twenties. Everyone from Edith Wharton to Samuel Beckett. I’m a whore for first editions. An American Tragedy, Ethan Frome, and the French version of Beckett’s Watt, to name a few.

Scattered among these monuments are three of my own contributions to the world of letters: two slim volumes of short stories published before I was hired by Yale, and an underappreciated novel written in my late thirties that, despite some flattering reviews and a mention or two on a handful of year-end lists, is struggling to stay in print.

So back to my mother.

Lorna Baird died of stomach cancer at the age of fifty-four. She had a rare disease called neurofibromatosis, which the cancer infiltrated. Neurofibromatosis is a condition in which tumors manifest either topically, as moles or skin tags, or internally. In her case, one of the more tenacious little bastards attached itself to one of her adrenal glands and burst apocalyptically, seeding little baby malignant tumors all throughout her abdomen. At the time there was no known protocol for treatment. They tried everything: chemotherapy; radioactive isotopes; transcendental meditation. They even fed her shark cartilage. But the tumors organized their attack and grew so quickly that her abdomen swelled to the size of a cantaloupe.

During the final week of her life I sat beside her bed in the house I grew up in. She was unrecognizable. My mother—Mom—had been reduced to some childlike, larval version of herself. Hairless and wheezing and addicted to morphine. Her hands were monstrous and skeletal. Her breath tinged with a chemical rot.

I read to her from her favorite Anne Tyler book: The Accidental Tourist. She was sixty-three pounds. She was blind and didn’t know her own name. Eventually, she dissolved into nothingness. Like a patch of snow in a surprising, warm winter rain.

I don’t have neurofibromatosis. I just have good old-fashioned cancer.

2

Bella’s office. A desk. A few chairs.

BELLA

(To the audience) Reading Fiction for Craft is a requirement for aspiring Creative Writing majors. The purpose of the class is to read classic novels and discuss authorial strategies. And then I conduct writing exercises designed to employ various techniques.

The first novel we always study at the beginning of the fall term is Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Crime and Punishment. One of the many things I love about Dostoevsky’s masterwork is the way he renders his antihero. Discussions about Raskolnikov never disappoint. I’m always surprised by who connects with him, especially after he commits the two grisly murders. Gender doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it. Despite the fact that his two victims are female, the young women in class jump to his defense as aggressively as the young men, sometimes more so. It turns out that Raskolnikov is an equal-opportunity sympathy monger.

One day, while the class was engaged in a lively discussion about the murder of the pawnbroker and her sister, during the only lull in the conversation, a young man named Christopher Dunn said, “Someday I’m going to write a moment like that.”

It was the first time he’d contributed to the discussion without being solicited. Blurted from the back row, his statement silenced the class for a solid minute.

It was as if someone had tossed a dinner plate into the center of the room.

“Someday I’m going to write a moment like that.”

Just saying it out loud takes courage.

(A young man appears.)

CHRISTOPHER

Can I talk to you, Professor Baird?

BELLA

(To the audience) Christopher Dunn hovers at the threshold of my office. At the beginning of the term one of the first things I tell my students is that office hours are by appointment only.

CHRISTOPHER

If it’s a bad time I can come back.

BELLA

Come in.

(Christopher enters.)

(To the audience) He looks around a bit and is drawn to my lone piece of artwork: a framed twenty-by-twenty photo of a woman standing in the middle of a harvested cornfield. She’s in all black and tiny in the vast dead field. Spectral. In the distance, there’s a water tower with PLANO printed on it.

(To Christopher) That photographer graduated last year and she’s currently repped by a gallery in Chelsea.