Life, Death, Good Prose: Adam Rapp Makes His Sublime Broadway Debut, ‘The Sound Inside’

Attending Rapp’s Broadway debut (crazy it took 19 years!), I found myself lapping up his gothic metaphors and cockeyed similes (a woman observes of a younger man: “Our age difference is like an enormous cast iron pot hanging from the ceiling.”) I had missed the crazy-eyed bravado of his authorial voice, the romantic enshrinement of the greats: Faulkner, Balzac, Salinger and other worthies namechecked with irony-free gusto. The Sound Inside is not your usual, dialogue-driven drama; it’s an elliptical memoir dominated by self-consciously literary narration—pleasurable for its elegant prosody, but also a self-condemnation, marking the distance its characters maintain from life. “That sounds like writing,” is the gentle corrective the play’s characters—a solitary Yale fiction professor and one of her first-year students—offer each other at different times in a scene. In one of the impeccable staging’s nicest touches, director David Cromer has the professor interrupt her narration to jot down good phrases on a legal pad. The entire performance emanates, as it were, from that pad and woman, on a vast stage engulfed by shadows (masterfully marshalled by lighting designer Heather Gilbert). Everything we hear and see is subject to the laws of fiction.