(Jesse Green’s article appeared in The New York Times, 7/3; via Pam Green.)
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — It’s pretty easy to stun an audience into the kind of silence about which people say, “You could hear a pin drop.” Just a well-timed slap will do it.
But there’s a deeper kind of attention in the theater: the kind that comes from withholding the blow. When an audience is focused on what might be coming instead of what already came, you can hear a pin not drop.
That’s the silence — a beautiful hush of dread and wonder — that envelops “The Sound Inside,” Adam Rapp’s astonishing new play now receiving its world premiere, under the masterly direction of David Cromer, at the Williamstown Theater Festival. For its entire 90 minutes you are dying to know what will happen even while hoping to forestall the knowledge.
So is Bella Baird, the 53-year-old fiction writer and Yale professor who narrates much of the play. As the action starts she has received a terrible cancer diagnosis with little chance of survival.
Photo: The New York Times
