Your Most Pressing Broadway Questions Answered

15 MYSTERIES AND REVELATIONS ABOUT 4 HIGH-PROFILE NEW PRODUCTIONS:

‘LINDA VISTA,’ ‘THE ROSE TATTOO,’ ‘SLAVE PLAY’ AND ‘THE SOUND INSIDE’

ITTY BITTY BOOK CLUB Will Hochman and Mary Louise Parker in “The Sound Inside.” Who’s she? (Easy question.) Who’s he? (He’s new.)

THE SOUND INSIDE

Bella (Mary-Louise Parker), a terminally ill 53-year-old author and college professor, bonds with one of her kind-of-weird students, Christopher (Will Hochman), and asks him to do her a life-and-death-level favor. Things do not go as planned.

(1) I know Mary-Louise Parker’s name, but I’m not sure who she is or why she’s supposed to be so great.

Mary-Louise Parker is a rock star. Here are some of her best-known stage roles: In Craig Lucas’s “Prelude to a Kiss,” her Broadway debut, she was a beautiful young bride who accidentally switches bodies with a sick old man. She won an Obie Award for her portrayal of a young sexual abuse victim in “How I Learned to Drive.” (And she’s scheduled to reprise that role in 2020.) She won a Tony for her starring role as a mathematician’s brilliant, overshadowed daughter in “Proof.”

She had her own HBO series, “Weeds,” about a widow who made ends meet by dealing drugs (well, marijuana). And she took home an Emmy for her role in HBO’s screen version of “Angels in America,” playing a disturbed young Mormon wife who escapes into a fantasy world.

Plus a bunch of movies, including “Longtime Companion.” We could go on.

(2) Who’s the guy?

The character is Christopher, an oddly charming but difficult writing student (he just can’t be bothered with making or keeping appointments — likes to just drop in, even if a faculty member has strict, clearly posted office hours). But he loves Bella’s work and may even understand it, which gets you a lot of gold stars with any author. And he’s writing a novel of his own.

The actor is Will Hochman, who is making his (very impressive) Broadway debut. He played the role when “The Sound Inside” was at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. three years ago.

(3) Is the playwright Adam Rapp the same guy who was in the cast of “Rent”?

No, that was Anthony Rapp, his younger brother. Adam Rapp’s earlier plays include “Red Light Winter” (a Pulitzer Prize finalist) and “Hallway Trilogy.”

(4) Is it horribly depressing?

Not really. Yes, death is always on the table — and makes an appearance when you least expect it. But the two characters’ works of fiction, which we “see” read, are as intriguing as the authors’ real lives. And everything blends together.

KARAOKE NIGHT Part of the cast of “Linda Vista,” Tracy Letts’s new comedy about a divorced man with a few blind spots.

LINDA VISTA

A recently divorced man (Wheeler, played by Ian Barford), moves into a sterile new apartment and a couple of new relationships. He’s clueless about the emotional side of opposite-sex connections, but maybe he can learn. Place your bets here.

(5) So this guy Tracy Letts wrote this play. Why is that a big deal?

Three words. “August: Osage County.” That was Letts’s 2007 play, which won a bunch of Tonys and — oh, yeah — the Putlizer Prize for Drama. Lets is an actor too; he won a Tony for his portrayal of George in the last Broadway revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

(6) What’s the main character’s problem?

What isn’t? He used to be a photographer for a major Chicago newspaper. Now he’s a camera repairman in a dingy local shop. He used to be a husband and father. Now he’s a slovenly single guy with a beer gut and low self-esteem, which he treats bu putting down others. For some reason, seemingly intelligent women do sleep with him. The question is: How emotionally reckless will he be? And will that path leave him alone?

(7) Who’s the hero here?

There isn’t one. But the spontaneous-applause, you-tell-’em moment belongs to — and is well deserved by — Jules (Cora Vander Broek), a smart, likable life coach who has become Wheeler’s girlfriend. He dumps her (for a younger, Vietnamese-American woman who is pregnant by someone else) but comes back to beg for forgiveness. She politely tells him to — oh, let’s say, go jump in a lake. Why is she turning him down, he asks? She answers, “Because I respect myself.”

(8) What is that movie he’s always watching on TV?

“Barry Lyndon,” Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant period drama, known for its breathtaking cinematography. It starred Ryan O’Neal.as a handsome 18th-century Irishman with ambition.

POWER COUPLE A scene from “Slave Play.,” now on Broadway.

SLAVE PLAY

Part I: Scenes on a Southern plantation. Characters pair off and reveal just how the power dynamic played out in the days of slavery. Part II: Same actors, same characters (sort of), 150 or so years later. Nothing is what it seemed to be.

(9) So it’s a look at race relations. Is it supposed to be serious or funny?

It’s supposed to be funny about making its profoundly serious points.

(10) Who are the major characters?

Four 19th-century black people, all enslaved, and four 19th-century white people, either slave-owners, ladies of the house or overseers. In the second part, we meet the two leaders of a weekend workshop. And the 21st-century counterparts of the original eight characters. Now they’re interracial couples.

(11) Who is the play really making fun of?

All of us, male and female, black and white. But the script does seem to particularly enjoy gently ribbing the workshop leaders — mental health practitioners who choose their words oh so carefully.

(12) If this is “Slave Play,” what was that thing I saw at the Public Theater earlier this year? The one where a 21st-century black guy is so freaked out by a racist incident that he demands that an old friend (a white guy) buy him, and then the slave-master relationship reveals more than either one of them expected.

That was “White Noise.” (Clearly, the name “Slave Play” could have worked.)

VOULEZ-VOUS COUCHER? (EXCEPT IN ITALIAN) Emun Elliott and Marisa Tomei in “The Rose Tattoo.”

THE ROSE TATTOO

An Italian-American widow (Marisa Tomei) has gotten all too comfortable with her mourning and loneliness. Then a handsome guy comes to town. Will she or won’t she?

(13) I thought Tennessee Williams wrote about neurotic white Southern women. Why is this play set in the middle of an Italian-American community on the Gulf Coast?

Tennessee Williams loved Italy. As an adult, he lived in Rome. He was friends with Anna Magnani, who starred in the film version of “The Rose Tattoo.” (She also starred in “The Fugitive Kind,” a film whose screenplay Williams wrote, opposite Marlon Brando as a biker.) Italian and Italian-American characters pop up here and there in Williams’s oeuvre. And don’t forget “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.”

(14) This got great reviews in Williamstown, right?

Yes, when “The Rose Tattoo” was presented at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts three years ago, Charles Isherwood of The New York Times declared it “buoyant.”

(15) And it got sucky reviews in New York?

Brantley, in The Times, referred to the production as an “untethered revival” and described Trip Cullman’s direction as “imaginative but erratic.” He gave Tomei credit as “bold and inventive” but added that she was unfortunately “in hard-fought competition with her environment.”

(16) What’s the upside?

The projection design, by Lucy Mackinnon, is fabulous. Ocean.