“Seminar”: My FT Review

Here’s my FT review of “Seminar,” a new Broadway play by Theresa Rebeck and starring Jerry O’Connell and Alan Rickman (pictured), as well as Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater. Full text after the jump.

Theresa Rebeck’s new play, Seminar, is sometimes facile and cumulatively glib, yet her high-sheen professionalism goes a long way towards disguising those defects. I cannot think of many other current American playwrights who could take her subject here – a class in fiction-writing – and craft a comedy that sustains our interest.

None of my praise means that – to pluck a term used by Leonard, the play’s writing teacher, portrayed by Alan Rickman – Seminar isn’t “whorish”. It gives a great deal of pleasure while never quite registering on the level of deeper feeling. Rebeck’s scary speed at turning out scripts for television may have sharpened her quips but dulled her sense of emotion. If Seminar were a comedy of artifice, these developments would not be especially concerning. But the play’s ending, a little too pat and inspirational for my taste, tries to transcend superficiality.

The humour comes less from one-liners than from the way the cast of five spin the interplay of praise and blame. Credit the result in part to the clean staging of the director, Sam Gold, and to the quartet he has assembled to play the students whom Rickman instructs privately in a sprawling, rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Kate, a feminist whose family lets the flat, does battle with Leonard’s criticisms most directly. Portrayed fetchingly by Lily Rabe, Kate recovers from classroom humiliation by seeking solace in junk food.

Martin, who is crashing in one of Kate’s spare bedrooms, is given just the right note of desperation by Hamish Linklater, an actor who has the uncanny gift of making losers seem sexier than anyone else in the room. Martin discovers secrets about the teacher that push the play’s plot – which consists mostly of classroom sessions and the characters hopping in and out of bed – to its conclusion.

The other students are less developed. The slightly punk Izzy, played by Hettienne Park, springs a visual surprise early on; unfortunately, it’s the character’s signal achievement. The academic Douglas at first appears to be a player. But his costuming – orange trousers, loafers without socks: post-metrosexual – does the interpretation no favours.
Rickman could play Leonard, whose frequent fang-bearing serves to protect him against incurring new wounds, with his eyes closed. His eyes are open, and his effect abrasive.

Three stars out of five

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