We’ve all had ‘that’ teacher. The one with whom you feel a connection, something like a mentor, nothing like a lover, but someone who ‘gets’ you and your student ways. You bond. It’s good. Until it isn’t. In Adam Rapp’s 2018 play The Sound Inside, what starts out as adversarial becomes a profound relationship between writing professor Bella Baird, exquisitely portrayed by Aleks Malejs, and her spitfire aspiring novelist student Christopher Dunn, played by Brendan Didio.

The result is a riveting 95-minutes of dialogue between these two disparate yet similar souls.

Malejs opens the show with her character’s introduction: we learn Prof. Baird is not in good health and is devoted to teaching writing at Yale. She smoothly narrates her story while seamlessly sliding back into scenes, as though she was writing a story herself. Dunn is the tightly wound student, looking to pick a fight and argue his early-20s truth. He’s working on a novel (she convinces him to keep it a novella) and he’s either asking for advice or developing his plot by their discussions.

Malejs’ mellifluous voice and Didio’s edgy delivery are perfectly balanced. They debate as he rolls out the outline of his novel….which would have totally creeped out any professor of less sterner stuff.

This intense two-hander is played out on an intriguing set designed by Loraine O’Donnell, who recently left her executive artistic director post at the Kav. There are books everywhere, on shelves, as the base of a table, as walls. The visual texture these tomes create is simple, elegant, and evocative. Sparse props suggest the professor’s home and campus office. The back drop looks like a school-ruled tablet (the kind of tablet that used to mean a notebook) with The Sound Inside repetitively written in cursive that underscores a significant moment in Prof. Baird’s experience. And then there’s the sound; the intermittent sound of a #2 pencil writing scribbling and scrawling across a paper that just catches your ear. Theatre companion and I had a difference of opinion on this: methinks the sound of writing was completely intentional in its random placement. He thinks these mere missed cues and the sound belonged only when the character was actually, visibly writing. Nope. But when is a writer NOT writing?

The whole visual and aural effect of stage and script was mesmerizing and almost mystical. Director Kyle LoConti, O’Donnell, projection designer Nicholas Taboni, lightening designer Brian Cavanagh, and sound designer Gregory Tocin hit all the right notes here. The dynamic between Malejs and Didio is fine and Malejs’ poignant delivery about wellness and the power of the written word is quite touching.

Granted, the story is a little offbeat and perhaps not what you might expect, but it’s good, solid, and powerful work that will linger in the back of your brain when you leave. The Sound Inside is onstage until June 25: find tickets and info at kavinokytheatre.com