The extended silence, in a completely darkened theater, that begins Adam Rapp’s mesmerizing play The Sound Inside (at Studio 54 through January 12) suggests both despair and emptiness. Bella (Mary-Louise Parker), a fifty-three-year-old Yale professor, is too acquainted with both. A teacher of creative writing and a replacement-level fiction writer, she has been given a premature appointment with her own mortality, having discovered advanced stomach cancer that may or may not be treatable. A doctor gives her a 20 percent chance of survival, but she finds out he’s being generous. Bella strikes a slightly self-mocking, unsentimental tone as she tells us about her encounter with life-threatening disease, but the blackness of the stage equates with not just her death but her life. It’s a lonely one, unshared in any meaningful way with anyone. We all die alone, but Bella has largely lived alone—emotionally she’s not ill, just a space unfilled. She’s one of those middle-aged women who lets her hair go to hell and wears moth-ravaged sweaters. You get the sense that her liveliest conversations are with cats. When a door opens to pour light onto the stage from the rear, something clears within her. She doesn’t want to talk about her cancer. She wants to talk about one of her students. He’s the young man in the doorway. The more they get to know each other, the more light pours onto the stage.

Christopher (Will Hochman), a freshman in her writing seminar, remained quiet the entire semester