Inside Bella and Christopher: Exploring the Characters of

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.)

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: And Tyler, you’re playing her student. 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: 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.

During rehearsal, actors Tyler Miclean (Christopher) and Denmo Ibrahim (Bella) slipped away to interview virtually with KALW.

Photo by Richard Mosqueda

DENMO: Exactly. I think there’s so much beautiful mystery and a stripping of what we think is happening constantly. We think we know what the play is about and then, brilliantly, the writer Adam Rapp, continues to subvert that.

TYLER: And like any good play, too, there’s secrets that the characters are either very aware of, and are concealing, or not really aware of, and they come out in spite of them.

DAVID: Can you give a little bit away?

TYLER: (Laughs) Oh, my goodness! Give away a secret?

DENMO: We can give nothing. There is nothing to give. You come see the show, you experience the show, and then it will change the next time you see the show. DAVID: Are there subtleties that change from performance to performance?

DENMO: Every night is different. The play itself has multiple echoes and the piece continues to reveal itself.

TYLER: It’s a great pleasure to be in the middle of a run of a large section of the play and still be so curious. The secrets are also unraveling for us.

DENMO: And there’s so much language around what’s real and what’s imagined. A lot of the play lives in this place between “is that really happening?” or “is that being invented?”. [The play] has this metatheatrical element that becomes really exciting for us to imagine.