Mysterious and layered, it follows a middle-aged creative writing professor at Yale who becomes close to a student shortly after receiving a terrible cancer diagnosis. The two-person play, starring Mary-Louise Parker and Will Hochman, premiered to acclaim last year at the Williamstown Theater Festival and will open on Broadway next month, directed by David Cromer.
Rapp has had a remarkably prolific and varied career, having written some 30 plays, two novels, two graphic novels and nine books for young adults. His television credits include “The Looming Tower” and, coming up, an adaptation of the Philipp Meyer novel “American Rust.” Still, this is his Broadway debut.
Best known for Showtime’s “Weeds,” Parker is a stage regular, and a Tony Award winner for “Proof” in 2001. This spring, she’ll star in Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “How I Learned to Drive” on Broadway, in the role she originated off-Broadway in 1997.
A few days into previews for “The Sound Inside,” Rapp and Parker gathered in her dressing room at Studio 54 to talk about writing, acting and fame. (There was also a mention of their dogs. He has a puggle named Cesar; she has a cocker spaniel, she thinks, named Mrs. Roosevelt.) Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
This play is so much about writing, so why don’t you tell me about your process. Did you have the play pretty well mapped out when you started?
ADAM RAPP: I didn’t know how it was going to take shape. I never know. I just kind of have an idea and have a few moments that I need to get to, and sometimes I know what the end is, weirdly enough. I wrote it pretty quickly. I was really in the free-fall — that’s a word we used to have in the play that we cut — in the free-fall of the writing.
How do you do manage to produce so much? Do you approach writing a play like a day job?
RAPP: I wish. It’s hard to describe. It feels like when you’re falling in love. I’m totally out of control. Everything goes away. I don’t do my life well and I have to finish it or I feel like I’m going to drown. That’s why it’s hard for me to start something now because I have a job. I work on a television show, and I have to show up every day in the writer’s room. I have a new play that I’m so excited to write, that I want to talk to [Mary-Louise] about, that I want to talk to Cromer about. But the problem is, once I start talking about it, then I have to write it, and then I won’t go to work. It’s always been that way.
Ms. Parker, you’re a writer as well. Did the process of writing or publishing your book, “Dear Mr. You,” change you at all?
MARY-LOUISE PARKER: I think it did. I was able to own my writing. I’d written for Esquire for 15 years or something, and written for other things, but I didn’t really talk about it. There was this one moment where a fairly close friend of mine — who won’t remember saying this, so I can go ahead — read something that I’d written and asked me who helped me with it. I didn’t really understand what effect that had on me until I was doing my book and I was able to go and talk about my writing. Which I don’t mind, actually — especially in the way I mind talking about acting.
People just approached me completely differently. They communicated with me in a completely different way. I felt legitimate in a way I never do as an actor — rarely do.
You’re happy talking about writing in a way you’re not comfortable talking about your acting. Why is that?
PARKER: There’s a thing, and I can say, “I made that.” I can understand what about it is overwritten or when it’s convoluted, but I also can say, “That’s really good.” And I can’t do that with my acting, ever.
Why not?
PARKER: It’s too amorphous. And it’s my voice, it’s my body, it’s all these things I can’t separate from myself, that are tied into my ego and myself as a woman and my insecurities.
You’ve been in the public eye for a long time. Does it get easier?
PARKER: No. Some aspects of it do, but no. I don’t go to things unless I’m paid or I’m supporting somebody I care about. I don’t have social media. I guess that’s kind of revealing about how I feel about it.
RAPP: The level of recognition I have is so small it’s like someone will see me at a coffee shop or out in front of the theater and they’ll say “I like your work” — or they think I’m Michael Shannon. I’m not kidding, that’s happened like 900 times. And I have to be like, “No he’s my friend. He has a bigger head.” [Smiling] And then I feel bad because I think he looks like a monster.
PARKER: A sexy monster!
RAPP: Sexy monster, right.
PARKER: And a handsome monster!
RAPP: I like being more invisible.
PARKER: I feel pretty invisible also.
In New York City?
PARKER: Most of the time, yeah. There’s a guy in my neighborhood, he sees me all the time and I keep telling him I’m not Parker Posey. But every day that he sees me he thinks I’m Parker Posey. It’s just hilarious. The way he is so excited about the fact that I’m Parker makes me happy.
Let’s talk about “The Sound Inside.” Adam, Mary Lee Baird was your mother’s maiden name. Why did you choose to name your main character Bella Lee Baird?
RAPP: It’s not autobiographical at all. I think the thing that feels most common with my mother is she was just rigorously autonomous. She had a kind of lonely life. She didn’t ask much of the world in terms of being social or being loved or being sexual; she was kind of profoundly fine with her solitude. She was the oldest of 13 kids from a huge Catholic family, so part of it was she was just tired of being around a bunch of screaming Catholics.
Did you decide to name her Baird when you started writing or later on?
RAPP: I named her Baird immediately, and I don’t really know why. But it’s not an elegy to her. I’ve never really written about her directly. There are weird things that, actually, Mary-Louise does: You stand like my mom. It’s really weird. That’s just accidental, but I see a spectral version of her sometimes onstage.
Mary-Louise,you do a lot of speaking directly to the audience in this play, and I understand direct address is not your favorite thing.
PARKER: I feel differently about it now than I did even at Williamstown. I felt like it was something I could never achieve properly. But I’ve gotten closer. I’ve gotten a lot closer.
What was scary about it?
PARKER: Everything. I like the comfort and the elasticity of two people because things have to be somewhat self-generated when it’s just you. It becomes very technical. Because I want them to hear his beautiful writing — and in the best way, it’s not easy writing, in the absolute best way. Because it’s so rich. I want them to hear that richness, but I don’t want it to be about that. I want them to also get his story.
Can you tell me more about working with that kind of writing?
PARKER: I’ve done a lot of new plays. Sometimes the writer comes in and they’re like, “This is it.” And maybe there’s an “an” or an “and” changed — and that’s fine, too. And then there are times when it’s all over the place, and they bring in 20 pages every day, but no one else is a part of that. But I felt that [Adam] was part of it in a way that he’s like a character.
RAPP: It makes it easy when the actor is so dramaturgically inclined. She has a strange — I don’t want to use the word “witchy” because that’s stupid —
PARKER: Oh, I like it!
RAPP: She has a way of saying, “I need something here.” Or “I’m being too articulate here, I want to be inarticulate here.” Or “I don’t want to go into Bella’s bag of tricks where she can embroider, I want something that’s balder or harder.” Not a lot of actors I’ve worked with can actually come up with the thing they want in a way that is benefiting the dramaturgy of the play and not just benefiting their own performance or their own vanity.
PARKER: Can I ask a question?
Please!
PARKER: When you’re writing a novel, do you ever then see it dramatized? Or are you just like, this is a book, this is a this, this is a that?
RAPP: Yeah, I always know. I’ve never turned one into the other.
Is the feeling as you write the same?
RAPP: Not the same. For a book, it’s more meditative and controlled, and I feel like I can return to it. I feel like an adult. When I’m writing a play, I just feel like an adolescent.
This article originally appeared in
.