What’s inside ‘The Sound Inside’ at the Off-Central?

Mary Louise Parker won the Best Actress Tony Award in 2020 for her performance in Adam Rapp’s drama The Sound Inside. The play, in which a 50-something Ivy League professor confronts her mortality, requires a deft performance of both subtlety and bravado – Bella Lee Baird talks, via the fourth wall, directly to the audience almost the entire time.

For the current Off-Central Players production of The Sound Inside, Bella – who teaches creative writing and therefore speaks in smart, literary sentences – is embodied by Roxanne Fay, perhaps the bay area’s most versatile actress.

“I love Bella’s unreserved and unapologetic love of words and language,” declares Fay. “And also the way she talks to her students about being restrained, and things like that, because I think as much as she loves them, she holds a certain judgement of people who don’t use words quite so well.”

Bella has been diagnosed with intestinal cancer, the same thing that killed her mother many years before. As she’s grappling with this news, into her office barges Christopher Dunn (Weston Allen Kemp), one of her students. Rude and persistent, he doesn’t have an appointment, but he just has to speak with her. Reluctantly at first, she obliges him.

They discuss her unsuccessful novel, Billy Baird Runs Through a Wall, and its long-gestating followup. Christopher reveals that he’s written a novella called To Lie Facedown in a Field Full of Snow.

Where is this curious relationship going?

The Off-Center production is mesmerizing, even more so because the 42-seat black box theater allows an almost unheard-of intimacy, as Bella and Christopher thrust and parry through conversations both literary and life-or-death.

You probably won’t notice it, but if you’re watching carefully, maybe you’ll sense it. Christopher doesn’t exist.

According to director Debbie Yones, he is the sound inside Bella.

The playwright, Yones says, “certainly left a lot of clues that as I was reading the script, the first thousand times, I kept thinking ‘He’s leaving it open.’ Even the second-to-last line, ‘Did this park imagine him?’ Rapp leaves it entirely open to be interpreted.

“Bella had to manifest this person that was outside of her in order to get her past the moment that she stuck in: The traumatic decision that she has to make. And once I read the script with that in mind, the rest of it, honestly, was fun. To find and put together the thread that carries this storyline through – and can we do it?

“I wanted to be true to Adam Rapp’s word. And I didn’t want to go pitch-y on something that didn’t fit.”

Offers Fay: “This really sets itself apart from his previous work. He’s a good writer, but his work up to this point was not something that I felt really compelled to say the words. I hadn’t really felt that until The Sound Inside.”

When director Jones suggested that Christopher was merely a manifestation of something that Bella needed to find within herself, Fay understood. “Chistopher is that word-loving unapologetic part of herself,” she says. “And if you take that a step further, who’s to say that this whole thing isn’t her book?”

And so the lines are blurred between reality and fiction, need and want, verb and noun. Fear and loathing. “I like to believe that I brought my own vision, my own sensibility, to it,” says Yones. “And of course Roxanne brings a depth and an honesty, and the space allows for an intimacy that we got to leverage.”

The production’s success is also due, in no small part, to Kemp’s tighly-wound performance as Christopher. Kemp is a New York actor who’d been hankering to do The Sound Inside; as such, he combed audition notices from all across the country.

And there it was: The Off-Central, St. Petersburg, Florida was holding auditions.

“He blew us out of the water,” Yones recalls. “He came in and gave a brilliant prepared monologue, and then he did the reading. We were being all cold and professional, ‘thank you very much, could you please wait in the lobby and we’ll come back out in just a moment’ …

“We all turned to each other, and it was ‘Oh my God!’”

There are performances of The Sound Inside Wednesday through Sunday, Nov. 13-17. Details and tickets are here.