Hamish Linklater, Alan Rickman, Jerry O’Connell, Lily Rabe (standing),
and Hettienne Park in a scene from Seminar
(Photo credit: Jeremy Daniel)
It isn’t until two-thirds of the way through Theresa Rebeck’s new comedy drama that Seminar catches fire. In a tirade of legendary dimensions, British stage and screen star Alan Rickman as famed editor and writing teacher Leonard tells what his life has been like trying to please readers, critics and editors. In this speech, he peels away layers of disappointments, distancing devices, and self-deceptions, revealing the hurts and wounds that lie beneath his forbidding exterior. From this moment on, Seminar crackles with excitement. Maybe it is a good thing that this 100 minute new play has no intermission.
For this story of a fiction writing workshop taught by an irascible and disdainful editor with a great deal of influence, hot director Sam Gold (who won the Obie Award in 2010 for both Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens) has surrounded Rickman with an ensemble of young names to reckon with. Rising stage stars Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater are reteamed after their huge success in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s 2010 production of The Merchant of Venice in which they played opposite each other as Portia and Bassanio, respectively. Television star Jerry O’Connell and Hettienne Park make their Broadway debuts.
Rebeck’s work tends to vary in content and subject matter from play to play: the theater in The Understudy, social mores in Bad Dates, politics in View from the Dome, international relations in Omnium Gatherum, commerce in Mauritius, myth in The Water’s Edge, etc. In Seminar, she has taken on the literati, both people who write and read books. The members of the class have paid $5,000 each to attend a ten-week private course with Leonard, not only because he is now a famous editor (once an acclaimed novelist), but also because they think he can help forward their careers. Kate (Rabe) has agreed to let the seminar meet in her nine room, rent-controlled Upper West Side apartment with its view of the Hudson River that she has inherited from her family.
The seminar bring together pretentious, name-dropping Douglas (O’Connell), on-the-make Izzy (Park), uptight Martin (Linklater) who can’t show anyone his work, and blocked Kate who has been working on the same Jane Austen pastiche for six years. Rebeck satirizes their talk of The New Yorker, post modernism, tonality, use of language, and whether Kerouac wrote On the Road in one week. However, when Leonard arrives, the tone changes. They also flirt with each other, pair off, change partners, play one-upmanship, and try to woo Leonard both mentally and sexually. Kate loves Martin, but he desires Izzy, who may be more interested in Leonard. Burning question: who will get to sleep with Leonard first and whom will he help get published first?
Leonard is insulting, rude, chauvinistic, disdainful, reductive and hurtful. He is also right on the button as to their worth as writers. Can they stick it out along with their hurt feelings? But is he also dishonest and untruthful as Martin will have us believe? The play turns from comedy to drama when Leonard makes his apologia as to what his life as a writer has been, both as someone who became famous too early and as someone to whom following up his own success became a form of hell. And then the play turns tense and compelling. The brittle language is gone and suddenly the characters are seen clearly with all their true motivations and desires in stark relief. The final confrontation leaves a very powerful emotional wallop.
You may have heard of the controversial scene in which Leonard critiques a piece of writing after only reading five words up until the first semi-colon. We have all known destructive teachers who, with a withering sentence, can make someone either stop writing or refuse to come back to class. However, it is possible to judge style and tone from reading only one paragraph of a work of fiction. And if a piece of writing doesn’t grab you in the first few lines in this day of Nooks and Kindles, one has probably lost the readership. Leonard may seem extreme, but he is believable and in some cases justified. How else to deal with pretentiousness and derivativeness when it surfaces week after week?
The arrogant and contemptuous editor is the sort of role that Rickman has specialized in throughout his career. He has the audience both on stage and in the seats eating out of his hand from the moment he makes his first appearance. He uses his voice as a musical instrument with the slightest of inflections. When the play finally allows him space in its last third, he strips off the last layer of his carefully built persona in a feat that is almost out of Greek drama, and shows his character metaphorically naked and bleeding. This is another remarkable performance to add to his previous Broadway roles in the 1987 Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the 2002 Private Lives.
Director Gold makes sure that the rest of his cast register, but not all to the same degree. Linklater who has been seen in David Ives’ School for Lies (from The Misanthrope) and Delacorte’s The Merchant of Venice in the past year and a half proves his versatility. His Martin, petulant, jealous, retiring, intellectual, could not be more different than his roles in the Moliere and the Shakespeare. Here his performance is realistic, staccato, unembellished, and humorless.
Rabe who has been extraordinary in earlier New York roles is a bit of a disappointment. The play makes her a whiny rich kid with an extremely thin skin and an inability to give as good as she gets. Unfortunately, Rabe doesn’t give us a subtext to this but plays the role only as it appears on the page. O’Connell as the affected name-dropping nephew of a famous playwright has a mobile face that registers all his character’s phony emotions. Park wraps herself in an aura of sexuality that explains why the men on stage can’t keep their minds - or hands - off of her.
David Zinn, who up until now has only designed costumes for Broadway, running the gamut from A Tale of Two Cities to Xanadu to the current Other Desert Cities, has this time created both the set and the clothing. His Upper West Side apartment in grey, black and red is a ravishing example of contemporary chic, while his present-day costumes define the characters from the moment we meet them. Ben Stanton’s lighting subtly directs attention where it should be on Zinn’s set. John Gromada is responsible for the appropriate original music and sound design.
Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar begins as a light, brittle comedy of contemporary manners and ends as a drama of classical proportions. Alan Rickman, lately released from the completed Harry Potter franchise as the supercilious Professor Snape, adds another deft portrayal of an arrogant though damaged man of ideas to his gallery of indelible portraits. He is joined by rising stars Lily Rabe, Hamish Linklater, Jerry O’Connell and Hettienne Park, from whom greater things are yet to come. Seminar is a play of literary concerns that is an unusual entertainment, particularly for Broadway.
Seminar (open run)
Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-239-6200 or http://www.telecharge.com