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    The Sound Inside
    The Sound Inside
    The Sound Inside
    Ebook79 pages53 minutes

    The Sound Inside

    By Adam Rapp

    4.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook


    • The Sound Inside received its world premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in the summer of 2018. The production starred Mary-Louise Parker and was directed by David Cromer.

    • The Williamstown production will transfer to Broadway in the fall of 2019 at Studio 54, with the same cast.

    • The play was commissioned by Lincoln Center Theater.

    • The Sound Inside was a New York Times Critic’s Pick. NYT critic Jesse Green named the play one of his top 10 shows of 2018.

    • Rapp’s play Red Light Winter was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2006. The play also earned him an Obie Award as well as Outer Critics Circle and Lortel nominations.

    • Rapp’s other plays include The Purple Lights of Joppa Illinois, Wolf in the River, The Metal Children.

    • His playwriting honors include Boston’s Elliot Norton Award, The Helen Merrill Prize, The 2006 Princess Grace Statue, a Lucille Lortel Playwright’s Fellowship, The Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation Award.

    • In addition to writing plays, Rapp is also a director. He directed the world premiere of Karen O’s psycho opera, Stop The Virgens, for The Creators Project at St. Ann’s Warehouse, which was then selected for The Vivid Live Festival, where it sold out the Sydney Opera House for six performances. He also directed Sam Shepard’s True West at Actors Theatre of Louisville, which went on to be named one of the 2012 Best Moments in Culture by Louisville’s N.P.R. Affiliate, WFPL. His production of Finer Noble Gases garnered a Fringe First Award at the 2006 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where he received The List’s Best Newcomer Prize.

    • Rapp has taught at the Yale School of Drama.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTheatre Communications Group
    Release dateMar 10, 2020
    ISBN9781559369350
    The Sound Inside
    Author

    Adam Rapp

    Adam Rapp is an OBIE Award-winning playwright and director, as well as a novelist, filmmaker, actor, and musician. His play The Purple Lights of Joppa Illinois had its world première last month at South Coast Repertory. His other plays include Red Light Winter (Citation from the American Theatre Critics Association, a Lucille Lortel Nomination for Best New Play, two OBIE Awards, and was named a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize), Blackbird, The Metal Children, Finer Noble Gases, Through The Yellow Hour, The Hallway Trilogy, Nocturne, Ghosts in the Cottonwoods, Animals and Plants, Stone Cold Dead Serious, Faster, Gompers, Essential Self-Defense, American Slingo, and Kindness. For film, he wrote the screenplay for Winter Passing; and recently directed Loitering with Intent. Rapp has been the recipient of the 1999 Princess Grace Award for Playwriting, a 2000 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, and Boston’s Elliot Norton Award; and was short-listed for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, received the 2006 Princess Grace Statue, a 2007 Lucille Lortel Playwriting Fellowship, and the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

    Read more from Adam Rapp

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    Reviews for The Sound Inside

    4.5/5

    22 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Incredible - saw the play this weekend with my son as Christopher Nunn. It's so thought provoking after the play ends having you wonder about so many things. Highly recommend seeing if ever being done at a theater near you!
    • 5/5
      I am just floored. This might be one of the best plays I have read in a long, long time. Such precise dialogue. And it is so dang quick.
      Wow.
    • 5/5
      very very interesting and powerful and unexpected. I will not forget this play.
    • 5/5
      I just can't wait to get the chance to see the play sometime. Awesome piece of work !!!
    • 4/5
      Your story deserves a lot of audience; you can publish it on Novel Star Mobile App
    • 5/5
      The story is powerful; I like how it was presented. Good job writer! If you have some great stories like this one, you can publish it on Novel Star, just submit your story to hardy@novelstar.top or joye@novelstar.top
    • 5/5
      One of the most stunning plays I have ever read.

    Book preview

    The Sound Inside - Adam Rapp

    1

    Bella, a middle-aged woman, emerges from the darkness.

    BELLA

    (To the audience) A middle-aged professor of undergraduate Creative Writing at a prestigious Ivy League university stands before an audience of strangers. She can’t quite see them but they’re out there. She can feel them—they’re as certain as old trees. Gently creaking in the heavy autumn air.

    Is this audience friendly, she wonders? Merciful? Are they easily distracted? Or will they hear this woman out?

    And what about her?

    Ironically, she often dissuades her students from describing a protagonist in too fine of detail. Readers only need a few telling clues:

    The countess possesses a shock of white hair.

    The farmer’s mouth is a shriveled ax wound.

    The only distinguishing characteristics Salinger gives Holden Caulfield are his height and that little patch of gray hair at the side of his head. If you do your authorial job correctly your reader will create the rest of the character.

    And in going against her own professorial mandate she describes this woman to said audience of strangers.

    Beyond her somewhat forgiving brown eyes, your narrator could be described as unremarkable. In that thorny subjective bureau of classification known as the Looks Department, if she’s being brutally honest with herself, she’d say she’s perhaps four or five degrees beyond mediocre, also known as sneakily attractive.

    She is the equivalent of a collectible plate mounted to a wall.

    *

    BELLA

    Autumns in New Haven, where the temperature drops so fast it’s as if God is hoarding something; as if he’s keeping a piece of this world for himself. Yes, my God is a man. He’s selfish and smokes a pipe and looks like a perverted eighteenth-century French novelist. My God is a fat man with money who can still get it up. His penis is short and stout and stiff as an old book. My God has gamy breath and gout. My God is basically Honoré de

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