Seminar at the John Golden Theater
The new play Seminar, written by Theresa Rebeck, is the work of a creative angry with the process. In the course of the production writers are called “feral cats” and “talented nobodies” and the process of writing a novel is generally scorned and bemoaned. However, it’s also the work of a writer who truly admires her fellow writers and what they go through every day, and who looks at the process of writing as more than putting words on a page, but as the shaping of a language into something profound and beautiful, something even the feral cats can be proud of.
Beyond the written word of the script, though, the play belongs to Alan Rickman, the internationally-renowned actor who is perhaps best known for portraying Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series, and whose low, gravelly, and extremely British voice has him eternally typecast as the misunderstood villain. In person Rickman is more powerful than imaginable on the screen. The lines spill from his mouth with great fluidity of motion and spirit, and when in the midst of a rant (as his character, private writing teacher Leonard, usually is), he leans forward as if he must put extra strength behind the delivery for it to hit home. We don’t need it, though, as we’re already in thrall of the ability we see on the stage.
Writing, as many such behind-the-scenes stories have told us, is depressing, and the four young adults who’ve signed up for Leonard’s class are no exception to the writers’ rule. Kate (Lily Rabe), a bespectacled twenty-something who’s been working on the same Jane Austen homage for six years, is the patron of the ten weekly meetings in her massive apartment her parents rent to her for eight hundred dollars a month and can’t handle Leonard spewing abuse at her mediocre work. Martin (Hamish Linklater) is a cowardly and poor deadbeat living in Queens who can’t bear for anyone to see his work, let alone his teachers. Izzy (Hetienne Park) is the pathetic Martin’s love interest and a proponent of Asian eroticism in writing to get ahead. She’s provocative enough to first sleep with Leonard and then Martin after he tells her she could do much better than Rickman’s character. Finally, there’s the effeminately dressed Douglas (Jerry O’Connell, who played quarterback Frank Cushman in Jerry Maguire), whose father’s name is so familiar in literary circles he can get his work published in The New Yorker even if it is, in Leonard’s words, “whorish.” The individual whirlwind depressions of the four collide explosively under Leonard’s tutelage as they struggle not to insult each other’s work and to keep their own from Leonard’s critical eyes.
Leonard has his own problems. He’s gone through the novelist’s paces (he describes writing your second novel as “the ninth circle of Hell”) before his career trailed off and he ended up teaching university creative writing classes and then being accused of plagiarism by one of his students. He was then forced to take on editing and private teaching jobs and found himself to be good at them. Unfortunately for his private pupils, though, his style can be a little intense, and it’s not long in the six-room apartment before tensions arise and all present are forced to address them.
Though a little pretentious and including nudity and expletives for their own sake in places, the script is perfectly acceptable, and anyway it’s not the words you’re thinking of but the thought behind them. The actors deliver the lines like writers, walk like writers, and act like writers. It’s a writers’ play that can only be called great because of the actors. In this way it’s almost like a meeting in the middle, a compromise between the cast and creators to achieve something that is fully worth seeing.
Actually it is a nine-room apartment, and you can only see the river from two of them. :)
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