The Sound Inside

Bella Baird teaches creative writing at Yale. One of her students, Christopher, is an enigmatic sort, doesn’t talk much in class, comes across as a loner, an outsider. This is the moving story of their kind of relationship, what each needed from the other and got, and what was lost in the process. It’s a memory play so not surprisingly it starts in a soliloquy, Bella talking to the audience, musing first on the discipline he teaches, writing, specifically how to captures a personality on page not in a flood of details but one well chosen single one. “The countess possesses a shock of white hair.” “The farmer’s mouth is a shriveled ax wound.” Then she talks about herself: how at fifty-three the beginning of her tenth tenured year at Yale, she doubled over in pain and was taken in for emergency surgery for a ruptured intestine and how, during the operation, they discovered that her stomach was riddled with tumors. She has stage two stomach cancer. Bella lives alone, has never married, has no living relatives. She’s always been healthy, eats a low-fat, high-fiber diet, drinks no more than moderately. She lives in faculty housing, doesn’t own any real estate. “Essentially a walking social security number,” she says. Her only vice is books: she owns first editions of authors from Edith Wharton to Samuel Beckett. Her own literary output? Two slim volumes of short stories and a well received but now nearly forgotten novel. Bella’s mother died horribly at fifty-four, a year older than Bella is now, of a determined condition called neurofibromatosis. It usually wasn’t fatal, just disfiguring, but something happened and her mother ended with malignant tumors that caused her belly to swell to the size of a cantaloupe. Bella doesn’t have neurofibromatosis though, just old fashioned stomach cancer.Bella always starts her creative writing class with Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: “Discussions about Raskolnikov never disappoint.” One day, while the class is engaged in discussion of the murder scene, a young man, Christopher, who seldom speaks, blurts out, “Someday I’m going to write a moment like that.” With this, the play segues from monologue to dialogue.Christopher appears at her office outside stated office hours. He hadn’t emailed asking for an appointment because he hates email. Twitter too. “A hundred and forty f***ing characters. Limitation is the mother of invention? It’s more like the mother of mental syphilis!” They end up talking about Raskolnikov. The conversation isn’t easy. She’s aloof. He’s prickly. The next day, he’s back. Another conversation. It finally comes out: he wanted to talk to her because he’s started a novel. He just has the first scene so far but his description of it impresses her. A few more visits and the questions start to get personal, which is disturbing to Bella who holds off engagement with real humans as though it were contagious. Why is she so isolated, Christopher asks. Does she have any friends? She doesn’t say so but no she doesn’t. She isn’t even sure of the first name of the visiting professor in the graduate architecture program with whom she plays tennis every Tuesday. She learns s little about his life: mother, a successful mystery novelist who rarely goes lout, may be agoraphobic; a father he hasn’t seen since he was five. He tells her he read her novel and loved it. He wants to know when the next one is coming out. But it isn’t. She isn’t writing anything anymore. They talk. Books, books, books. But they’re really edging around talking about relationships, their relationship, what are they to each other, can two unhappy people relate to each other, maybe assuage their shared loneliness, though they never come out and say any of this. There’s one moment when they touch but it passes. The next time she sees him in class, he’s distant. She hadn’t betrayed him, but she hadn’t done anything.Events unfold. Bella describes a ghastly one-night stand, which did nothing to ease her loneliness. Shortly after, she collapses and has to be taken to the hospital to recover. While she’s there, she gets a card from Christopher with a photo of Dostoevsky on it and a note inside, deliberately casual, almost flippant, like young unsure college boys write to hide feeling. Before she leaves the hospital, her doctor tells her she has a one out of five chance of surviving her cancer. She doesn’t teach again until the next semester and in the meantime she decides to commit suicide, rather than suffer like her mother had at the end. She finds a suicide kit: you order it on line. You take one drug to knock yourself out and two more to paralyze your respiratory system and stop your heart. You need a helper for steps two and three. She invites Christopher to dinner. Before she can tell him she wants him to help her die, he tells her he’s finished his book. It’s a novella now, not a novel. The title is To Lie Facedown in a Field of Snow. He asks if she’ll read it. She unloads her bombshell on him and then they talk through his manuscript, reading passages en route. Christopher is worried about the ending. She says don’t worry, the book is amazing. Then Christopher helps her administer the first drug and she tells us, she fell asleep.Seventeen hours later she wakes up and Christopher is gone. The second and third syringes rest on a chair, unadministered.She never sees Christopher again. He doesn’t show up in class: someone finds his body on the New Haven Green, face down in the snow, he died of hypothermia. Her life continues. At her next checkup, the doctor informs her that her cancer is in remission: the tumors are almost all gone. She reads Christopher’s novella from start to finish: “It’s one of the most honest things I’ve ever read,” she says. She muses about his death. Did it mean anything?The play ends. The (unexpressed) implication is: what does have meaning? Anything at all? Or maybe everything?A beautiful play, and very moving.

Tense, unexpected, raw, and simply brilliant. The sentences are stunning; the dialogue sharp and essential. If I could read a play like this just once every few years, I'd be happy, and grateful, enough.

An important play brimming with humanity, sadness, companionship and the unexpected. A deeply poetic display of isolation and loneliness.

The best Broadway play. The best cast. I cried and I laughed. Poignant intense unforgettable. A brilliant story. The book is one to keep and re-read forever. I have been completely enraptured by this profound work of art.

Pretty good. Depressing, and a bit like W;t but more restrained. The characters are presented without commentary. The story is presented with the mystery of its events presented plainly.

Adam Rapp never disappoints. There is always a twist one never sees coming. No wonder this one ended up on Broadway.

If you wish to relate in some way to one of the characters or theme this book may not be for your. I simply did not like either character, to the point that I really disliked them both. I found some of the scenarios in the book down right repulsive to my personal sensibilities. I do not wish to spend time listening to someone's account of unrewarding vulgar sex. I do not wish to listen to the rambling and rantings of an immature narcissistic college student. The medical problems in the book sounded improbable to me. The at home assisted suicide that the author drew up is just not going to happen as well as the bizarre idea that a person would ask a near stranger to help with this. I guess there was nothing I could relate to and no one in the book that I wanted to cheer on. It was a waste for me.