In Coal Mine Theatre’s deftly directed ‘The Sound Inside,’ a professor and student languish in lonesome tragedy

The Sound Inside

By Adam Rapp, directed by Leora Morris. Until May 28 at The Coal Mine Theatre, 2076 Danforth Ave. coalminetheatre.com

Unmoored, drifting in the ether between fiction and reality, the two anti-heroes of “The Sound Inside” are loners. But they’re also perpetual observers — pathetically waiting, watching from the sidelines for a storybook narrative that never quite arrives.

Bella Baird (Moya O’Connell) is a 53-year-old Yale professor of creative writing, a self-described “single, self-possessed” woman without children nor a spouse who has spent much of her life in higher education with little to show for it.

Christopher Dunn (Aidan Correia) is one of Bella’s students, an enigmatic freshman who first displays rabid machismo — he lumbers with a heavy step, throwing his backpack around without care — yet is, too, a sensitive, friendless misfit.

How the stories of these wistful souls intersect forms the basis of Adam Rapp’s riveting two-hander, now receiving an exquisite Canadian premiere at Coal Mine Theatre.

We learn early on that Bella is diagnosed with an aggressive cancer and given a 20 per cent chance of survival. Christopher, meanwhile, is struggling to write a novel, willing to push almost everything else aside to focus on this endeavour.

The plot unfolds like a mystery. But I’m hesitant to fully categorize it as such. A mystery brims with suspense and an unrelenting drive toward an inevitable conclusion. Sure, “The Sound Inside” possesses those qualities. Yet as much as you want to learn what comes next — do Bella and Christopher find salvation in each other? — you’re also content to revel in the profound beauty of Rapp’s prose and his dense character study of two seemingly disparate personalities.

Rapp paints with words as an impressionist artist does with strokes of a brush, be it a scene when Christopher and his professor discuss the virtues of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” or a moment when Bella recalls her grim diagnosis.

The narration trades gracefully between Bella and Christopher. Scenes that flourish with figurative language are juxtaposed with others that are brutally clinical, presented succinctly with the cold, hard facts.

That impressionistic texture — always probing, never too obvious — extends to Leora Morris’s direction, which eschews excess for mesmerizing symbolism.

Wes Babcock’s set, for instance, is spare, populated with a wooden desk and two chairs. Similarly, his lighting design deftly draws the audience’s gaze to the physical details of each scene. Using this simple production design, Morris shifts the action between locales on Coal Mine Theatre’s small proscenium stage with ease.

Perhaps her most memorable directorial choice reveals itself throughout the 90-minute work. As the story plays out, Bella’s wooden desk drawers are slowly removed, only to be stacked, criss-crossed atop one other, at a front corner of the stage.

The symbolism of this will be interpreted differently by each viewer, but I took it as a piercing metaphor for the emptiness of Bella’s and Christopher’s lives, a void filled with loneliness and unmentioned despair.

As professor and student, O’Connell and Correia are impeccably cast, capturing their characters’ repressed melancholy with delicacy and insight. O’Connell, a familiar face at the Shaw Festival, exudes a warm vulnerability, foiled by Correia’s erratic swings between fits of passion and emotionless reclusiveness.

Together, they have wonderful chemistry and, like Rapp’s always surprising text, steer clear of the clichés that often seep into stories about student-professor relationships in higher education.

For a play about writing, language and storytelling, Rapp seems less concerned about finding a resolution to all the threads woven into the plot than the journey to that conclusion, even if it means he fails to explore — or even acknowledge — the possible consequences of his characters’ actions.

Still, there’s no denying the power of Rapp’s play, as presented in Morris’s thrilling new production. It’s an insightful, powerful meditation on loneliness, agency and the stories we write — both for ourselves and for others.

Ponder the questions it raises, revel in its exceptional writing and bask in the spell it casts.

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