By

Long after “Weeds,” the mid-aughts television show about pot and the suburbs, had fully lost its way, I kept tuning in to watch Mary-Louise Parker. (Has anyone ever sipped an iced latte with such feeling?) Now that I live in New York, I have the chance to see her onstage every few years, most recently in Adam Rapp’s masterful new play, “The Sound Inside,” which opens on Broadway this week. Parker is cast as a creative-writing professor who seems to have given up on the possibility of anything happening in her life, but then she befriends an unusual student (Will Hochman) and receives a daunting medical diagnosis. Rapp’s play, which, as the professor says at one point of the student’s novella-in-progress, keeps “a nice amount of dread simmering,” deals in good stories and the people who love them — both characters are fascinated by Dostoyevsky and think Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms” is underrated. As things progress, the line between their realities and their writing blurs in a way that’s sure to inspire close reading, though Parker’s talent is as obvious as ever. For tickets, soundinsidebroadway.com. And read “The Sand and the Snow,” a play that Rapp wrote exclusively for T, here.