Inside Bella and Christopher: Exploring the Characters of The Sound Inside Actors Denmo Ibrahim and Tyler Miclean joined KALW Radio’s “On the Arts” with host David Latulippe for a conversation about the fascinating, iconoclastic characters of The Sound Inside. Here are some excerpts from that interview. (You can listen to the entire KALW “On The Arts” episode here.)
TYLER MICLEAN: I have the privilege of playing Christopher Dunn, a freshman in the creative writing program at Yale University. He’s very passionate, very opinionated, really well-read. He’s very mysterious.
DAVID LATULIPPE: This is called a twohander. I’m always wondering why it’s called a two-hander when there are four hands involved! DENMO IBRAHIM: (Laughs) You know, that’s a really good question! It’s true, it is a two-hander. The structure of the play is unusual in the sense that it is built a little bit more like a short story, actually. Of course there’s dialogue, but there’s also large sections of storytelling. It’s a different kind of two-hander. I have the privilege of playing Bella Lee Baird, who is a professor of undergraduate creative writing. She’s a writer herself and she’s one of those people that really loves what she does. We meet her in a moment in her life where everything is changing, everything is falling apart and also being reinvented.
DAVID: How does this become a thriller between the two of you? DENMO: So much of the play is painted in the picture of the audience’s mind. When you’re reading a book, you’re creating the ambiance and the environment of the world. And in this play, the audience is actually a very important aspect of how the play unfolds. [The audience] is getting clues along the way and you’re having to piece it together. DAVID: Like a good thriller, the character we first meet onstage is not the character that we see at the end of the play.
DAVID: And Tyler, you’re playing her student.
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