Review: THE SOUND INSIDE at Pasadena Playhouse

A smart play about equally intelligent people who love books should be catnip to theater critics. Not that this is automatic, but when you’ve got a guy like Adam Rapp writing a cerebral two-handed dance between a Yale creative writing professor and her enigmatic new student, and you pepper it with scribes ranging from Dostoevsky to  Anne Tyler, and you give the whole shebang to The Pasadena Playhouse and cast Amy Brenneman in the lead role, well, what’s not to like.

In the Playhouse production directed by Cameron Watson, almost nothing. THE SOUND INSIDE is as mysterious as it is affecting, a haunting, lovely play for adults, those who love the craft of storytelling and those who don’t. When it premiered on Broadway in 2019, THE SOUND INSIDE marked Rapp’s Broadway debut and won Mary-Louise Parker her second Tony. In Pasadena, Brenneman and Anders Keith more than deliver the goods. With Center Theatre Group’s Mark Taper Forum indefinitely dark, The Pasadena Playhouse is demonstrating with each production that it is ably picking up the slack as the region’s largest high quality theatrical destination.

Solid building blocks are always good things. Those would be Rapp’s play and Watson’s cast. Word-loving Bella Baird (Brenneman’s character), our no-nonsense narrator, recounts an experience in her life that is part mystery, part revelation. And while this is Bella’s tale to unravel, when Chrostopher Dunn (Keith) enters her orbit, she’ll have to share the telling. Because Christopher is a storyteller, himself, perhaps a better one even than his mentor. We’ll see.

Back to Bella, a woman now in her 50s who has made choices, lives alone, and doesn’t entirely realize how isolated she has become, although a reckoning is coming. Friends, she has few. Mostly, Bella spends her semesters connecting – albeit not very intensely - with her students, through their works and through literary classics.  Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is a favorite.

Bella’s life has a certain pattern to it, but Christopher is a disruptor; he intends to write a tale of Dostoevsky-an impact. He arrives at Bella’s office, without making an appointment, and keeps coming back. The kid is rough, equally BS-free, a bit of a robot and not really a relationship guy. However, he’s also talented and he wants his teacher’s approval. A friendship-mentoring partnership develops that skirts impropriety although, as Rapp lays it out, this is clearly what both parties very much need. Matters take a turn, and Bella asks for her student’s help. In exchange, he requests that she read his completed manuscript. We come to learn more about Bella than we do about Christopher although these two people are clearly meant to be each other’s salvation.

Rapp’s structuring of this tight but somewhat mind-blowing, 90-minute dance is never dull and frequently arresting. The dialog is equally strong. In a given monolog, Bella can rip your guts out in her description of medical procedures or mine the funny of her description of an off-kilter sexual encounter.

Substantial credit, of course, goes to Brenneman who – before film and TV swept her away – was a founder and frequent player with the Cornerstone Theater Company. She’s been back on stage with more frequency of late (including opposite Bryan Cranston’ in last year’s THE POWER OF SAIL at the Geffen), and she’s every bit at home. Playing Bella, a difficult, multi-layered character, Brenneman’s connection to the audience is immediate. Attractive without being over-glamorized, the actress is instantly relatable. We fully get what this woman has been through, what she is experiencing, and we want it to turn out well. The take-charge, I’m in control veneer that she establishes at the outset soon falls away as Keith’s Christopher comes into her life. It’s a role that actresses past ingenue age should be lining up for.  

Keith is no slouch himself. The actor locates Christopher’s eccentricity and still makes this oddball genius relatable (anybody who has taken a college English class, at an Ivy League or otherwise, has met this kid) without being too weird. In Keith’s delicate work, we see his attraction to Bella that his dedication to this teacher and to his book are not necessarily mutually exclusive. We learn from the program that Anders Keith is a South Pasadena native whose Pasadena Playhouse debut is therefore kind of a stage homecoming. He’ll be on the upcoming Frasier reboot playing the title character’s nephew, and even if Dr. Crane is played out, Keith’s character will be one to watch.

The two actors pass Rapp’s narrative back and forth, mining the gold of long, glorious, detailed monologs. Until the play ends, as beautifully and enigmatically as it began.

THE SOUND INSIDE plays through Oct. 1 at The Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena.

Photo of Amy Brenneman and Anders Keith by Mike Palma

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