Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside carries six Tony nominations. Holden Street Theatres stages it now, in the Studio, for ninety tight minutes plus interval. The Studio places you close enough to have the intimacy this place deserves.
Bella Baird (Michelle Nightingale) teaches creative writing at Yale. Christopher (Benji Riggs) walks into her office, and every guess I made walking into the play turned out wrong. I expected an affair: an older professor, a young student, the usual cliché. Rapp swerves hard around it, and this is not that play.
Bella opens alone, the protagonist of this novel on stage. She talks straight at the audience for fifteen minutes before Christopher even shows up.
That kind of address can sometimes feel like a lecture, but here, it feels urgent, like Bella needs to get the words down before she loses them. Nightingale holds this stretch with real command, playing a woman who hides loneliness behind a keen intellect.
Benji Riggs then walks on as Christopher: awkward, brilliant, oddly tender. Riggs writes and composes his own work too, and that shows in how closely he listens on stage. Throughout, the two trade references to authors and novels including Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Jonathan Franzen, and lines sharp enough to sting, like ‘mental syphilis.’
Nick Fagan directs. His recent credits span Cyprus Avenue and Hangmen, two plays with the same slow-building dread, and he staged The Debate for Holden Street Theatres during its Adelaide Fringe Festival 2026 run.
In The Sound Inside, Fagan keeps his touch light. He trusts two actors, plain talk, and silences that carry the emotional weight this play delivers.
Bella teaches her students that a good ending feels inevitable. Rapp delivers exactly that kind of ending. On the way home, I kept finding more and more ways the ending had been cleverly foreshadowed, both directly and indirectly.
Nightingale beautifully plays a world-weary woman who has accepted her lonely lot. Riggs matches her. He swings between charm and something more brittle, steel and velvet, and he never loses his grip on the role. Their chemistry feels real, and it matters, because this play rests on one belief: two strangers can truly connect.
A good play executes a theme well; a great play still inspires new ideas and their application to your life long after you’ve seen it. The Sound Inside is the latter. Bring a friend who loves books, one who can namedrop authors and titles without breaking stride. Someone who knows the word ‘bibliosmia’ without a dictionary.
Rapp writes for anyone curious about words, memory, and the stories we tell to survive. The older I get, the more these things sit at the top of my mind. This play and this production deliver on everything six Tony Award nominations promise.
The Sound Inside
Holden Street Theatres, 32 – 34 Holden Street, Hindmarsh (Adelaide)
Performance: Thursday 13 August 2026
Season continues to 29 August 2026
Information and Bookings: www.holdenstreettheatres.com
Images: Michelle Nightingale and Benji Riggs in The Sound Inside – photo by Leo Hiraga | Benji Riggs and Michelle Nightingale in The Sound Inside – photo by Leo Hiraga
Review: Daniel G. Taylor