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The Sound Inside

By: Adam Rapp
Narrated by: Mary-Louise Parker, Will Hochman
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Publisher's summary

Tony®, Golden Globe, and Emmy® Award winner Mary-Louise Parker stars in what ​The New York Times​ calls “a gripping mystery” about Bella Baird, a​ ​novelist and Ivy League English professor who prizes her solitude. When faced with a challenge she cannot tackle alone,​ Bella must ally herself with a brilliant but mysterious student (William Hochman) and confront the question of what one person can truly do for another. Intensely intimate and deeply moving, Adam Rapp’s haunting play received resounding acclaim during its Broadway run at ​Studio​ 54 and was nominated for six Tony Awards​. ​Now available only on Au​dible, The Sound Inside is a “vital, compassionate and rivetingly theatrical drama about tragedy and redemption, sacrifice and loss, the bright blaze of artistic creation and the sadness of an unknowable stranger” (​The Hollywood Reporter)​.

Directed by David Cromer.
Music by Daniel Kluger by arrangement with peermusic

Portions of this audiobook contain mature language and themes. Listener discretion is advised.

©2019 Adam Rapp (P)2021 AO Media LLC
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Audible Questionnaire with Mary-Louise Parker

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Interview: Mary-Louise Parker Reprises One of Her Most Challenging Roles in 'The Sound Inside'

'I'm going to get into the cage with the lion again every night.'
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  • The Sound Inside
  • 'I'm going to get into the cage with the lion again every night.'

About the Creator

Adam Rapp is the author of numerous plays, which include The Sound Inside (Broadway, WTF), Nocturne (ART, New York Theatre Workshop), Finer Noble Gases (Rattlestick, Edinburgh Fringe, Fringe First Award), Kindness (Playwrights Horizons), The Metal Children (The Vineyard), The Hallway Trilogy (Rattlestick), Blackbird (The Bush, Edge Theatre), Stone Cold Dead Serious (A.R.T., Edge Theatre), and Red Light Winter (Steppenwolf, Barrow Street Theatre), for which he won Chicago’s Jeff Award, an OBIE, and was named a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. His playwriting honors include The Helen Merrill Prize, The Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation Award.

About the Director

David Cromer is director and actor originally from Chicago, currently based in New York. As a director, his New York credits include The Sound Inside (Broadway); The Band’s Visit (Atlantic Theater Company, Broadway & National Tour); the Broadway revivals of Brighton Beach Memoirs and The House of Blue Leaves; The Treasurer (Playwrights Horizons); Man from Nebraska (Second Stage Theatre); The Effect, Orson’s Shadow, and Tribes (Barrow Street Theatre); Women or Nothing (Atlantic Theater Company); Really Really (MCC Theater); When the Rain Stops Falling and Nikolai and the Others (Lincoln Center Theater); and Adding Machine (Minetta Lane Theatre). Other directing credits include BUG (Steppenwolf Theatre Company) Next to Normal (Writers Theatre); Come Back, Little Sheba (Huntington Theatre Company); The Sound Inside (Williamstown Theatre Festival); and Our Town in London, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Kansas City. As an actor, he recently appeared on Broadway as Howard Fine in the 2018 production of The Waverly Gallery. Prior to that, he appeared on Broadway as Karl Lindner in the 2014 revival of A Raisin in the Sun, and Off-Broadway as the Stage Manager in Our Town, which he also directed, at the Barrow Street Theatre. He appeared in the HBO series The Newsroom, the Showtime series Billions, and in the motion picture The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected). Cromer has received a Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, three Obie Awards, three Lucille Lortel Awards, a Joe A. Callaway Award, four Jeff Awards, and in 2010 was made a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

About the Performers

Mary-Louise Parker was last seen in Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside on Broadway (which she originally appeared in at the Williamstown Theater Festival), for which she is nominated for a Tony Award for Lead Actress in a Play. She will next be seen on stage in Spring of 2022 in the Broadway Revival of How I Learned to Drive, in the role which she originated off-Broadway (Obie Award, Lucille Lortel Award and an Outer Critics Circle nomination).
She also originated roles in the first productions of Proof (Tony Award, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Drama League, Lucille Lortel, Obie, and New York Magazine Awards, T. Schreiber Award), Prelude to a Kiss (Tony Award nomination, Theatre World Award, The Clarence Derwent Award, Drama Desk nomination), Heisenberg, The Snow Geese, Four Dogs and a Bone, and Babylon Gardens, and in the American premieres of The Art of Success and Communicating Doors. Her other theater credits include Reckless (where she earned her third Tony Award nomination), Hedda Gabler, Bus Stop, The Importance of Being Earnest, Up in Saratoga, Hay Fever, and others. She was a member of Circle Rep Theater Company and a founding member of the Edge Theater.
Television: Weeds (Golden Globe award, four additional nominations, three Emmy nominations, six SAG nominations), Angels in America (Emmy Award, Golden Globe, Satellite Award), The West Wing (Emmy nomination), The Robber Bride (Emmy nomination), Mr. Mercedes, When We Rise, Billions, Sugar Time, Saint Maybe, A Place for Annie, and others.
Film: Red Sparrow, Golden Exits, R.I.P.D, Red and Red 2, Behaving Badly, Pipe Dream, Chronically Metropolitan, Longtime Companion, Grand Canyon, Fried Green Tomatoes, Naked in New York, The Client, Bullets Over Broadway, Boys on the Side, Reckless, The Five Senses, Saved!, Romance & Cigarettes, Red Dragon, Solitary Man, Howl, and others.
Also a writer, Parker was an on-staff contributor at Esquire magazine for over a decade, and has written for The New York Times, O Magazine, Bullet, Bust, Hemispheres, The Riveter, In Style, and others. Her first book, Dear Mr. You, was translated into multiple languages and included on the San Francisco Chronicle’s list of best books of the year. The audiobook was nominated for best narration by the Audio Publishers Association.
Photo Credit: Jason Bell

About the Performers

Will Hochman made his Broadway debut in Adam Rapp's The Sound Inside, a critically acclaimed two-person drama opposite Mary-Louise Parker, directed by David Cromer. Other theatre includes Sweat at the Mark Taper Forum in LA, The Sound Inside at the Williamstown Theatre Festival (original cast), and Dead Poets Society at the Classic Stage Company (original cast). Film and television credits include Let Him Go for Focus Features, Critical Thinking, directed by John Leguizamo, the independent film Master, HBO's Paterno, and a recurring role as Detective Joe Hill on the CBS drama Blue Bloods.
Photo Credit: Sham Hinchey

What listeners say about The Sound Inside

Average customer ratings
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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Shockingly captivating

I loved it, not at all expected...but there is the ache in my chest that is familiar after a really good book.

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21 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Beautiful

Do yourself a favor. Get comfortable for an hour and a half. Loose yourself.

Amazing performance. I'll always cherish the 90 minutes.

Listen.

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20 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Unexpected, Thought-provoking, and Infinitely Personalizable

I had no idea what to expect and was intrigued by the idea of insight into a professional singleton.

The performance is engrossing and the characters both real and gauzy.

A delightful distraction that will have you reflecting and thinking for some time.

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8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Truly original Tragicomedy

This is a really unique novella - I never use that word to describe anything except fingerprints. My review wouldn’t do it justice. Just see and listen for yourself

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Brilliant

I loved every moment of this book. The professor sounds a bit unconcerned about her ailment when she meets.... But its easily not the point of the story.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Stopped everything I was doing...

...and just became immersed. Beautifully written, beautifully narrated. A story that stays with you. Good god need 15 words,enough now?!

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

What a nice surprise!

This novella was good! I really enjoyed listening to it- the storyline was very interesting. Wish it was longer!

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

A book within a book. A mystery within a mystery.

It pulled me in right away. Slightly quirky/unusual read but that totally made the experience better. The shift of narrator was an unusual tactic for this plot, but it made the experience. A book within a book. A mystery within a mystery.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

UNDELIVERABLE...

Amazing, what a story. What an ending. An absolute must listen.

Face down in the snow...

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

This Story Pissed Me Off.

The Christopher character is so redolent of the appalling level of UTTER INDULGENCE Young Straight White Males enjoy EVERY DAY in this country at Ivy League universities across this nation. It was difficult to get past the initial introductory scene of his meeting with the Professor who narrates the story. I won’t say what he does at that meeting, but suffice it to say I can not IMAGINE an African-American male student doing the same thing- with NO DISCIPLINARY CONSEQUENCES., Maybe that’s the hidden point. Well written. Well performed. Just another dispatch from a world where people like me don’t exist, or at best are used as plot device props. Baldwin gets mentioned once. Which I appreciated.

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