Pop quiz question: Can you name a single writer darker than Dostoevsky?
The options are few, but I hereby nominate Adam Rapp, the playwright and novelist whose vision is so unrelievedly grim he makes that despairing giant of Russian literature seem like, oh, maybe P.G. Wodehouse.
Rapp’s singularly gloomy weltanschauung is on stark display in his latest play, “The Sound Inside,” which has opened with a crypt-like creak at Studio 54 — of all places, one is tempted to add, given the building’s storied history of festivity. On the menu in this two-hander, starring the reliably excellent Mary-Louise Parker and a talented comparative newcomer Will Hochman, are a terminal cancer diagnosis, suicide and a vicious and senseless murder.
Review — The Sound Inside — BN+ — David Cromer — Studio 54 — Mary-Louise Parker — Adam Rapp — Will Hochman — Alexander Woodward — Heather Gilbert — P.G. Wodehouse — Dostoevsky — Yale — Crime and Punishment — Raskolnikov — James Salter — David Foster Wallace — Jonathan Franzen — Robert Coover — Shirley Jackson — Stephen King
