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by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Stewart Arnott

David Mirvish/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto

November 18-December 6, 2015

Kate: “Writers are not people”

Theresa Rebeck’s play Seminar from 2011 receives a highly polished production from David Mirvish and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre that is well cast, acted and directed.  The problem is that the play itself is so trivial and pointless, one wonders why so much care has been spent in producing it.  It is essentially a live sitcom, except that nowadays it is not hard to find sitcoms on television that are weightier and edgier than this.  Rebeck presents an amusing if totally superficial look at writing and writers, and develops a nasty sense of cynical humour.  Unfortunately, she ruins this with a rush of sentimentality that arrives in a surprise ending.

The play concerns four twentysomething would-be authors who have each paid $5000 to have a once-famous author lead them in a weekly, ten-session seminar.  The four writers are such patent stereotypes that they could easily be referred to as the Blowhard, the Slut, the Wallflower and the Nerd. 

The Wallflower is Kate (Andrea Houssin), who lives in a large rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where the group meets.  She’s a feminist who has been working on the same story for the last six years.  The Nerd is Martin (Nathan Howe), a childhood friend of Kate’s who sees through the pretences of others but is strangely unwilling to show his work to anyone, especially since he is paying so much money to have it critiqued.  With no income, he moves in with Kate.

The Blowhard is Douglas, the nephew of a famous writer and inveterate name-dropper and employer of critical jargon in a continual effort to impress.  The Slut is Izzy (Grace Lynn Kung) who starts off the show with a bit of gratuitous nudity and makes clear that she will do anything (like sleep with the right people) to get her work published.

The seminar is run by Leonard (Tom McCamus), a thoroughly disagreeable person who says from the start that his four students are all disqualified from  serious writing because they haven’t experienced the danger and extreme conditions that he has in the Third World.  We sense from the beginning that he and his students will not get along, and we are right because Leonard seems to take inordinate pleasure in talking about himself and in savagely attacking the work the students show him.  One of many obvious flaws in the play is why the group do not fire Leonard as their teacher when he is clearly so incompetent.

The seminars he leads are certainly not like any seminars I have ever observed or attended including those led by famous people.  Rebeck’s depiction of a seminar is unrealistic for three reasons. First, the seminar leader gives no assignments.  Even in a creative writing seminar participants are asked to produce work by a certain date or to compare samples of writing by well-known authors.  Leonard does nothing but show up and leave when he wants to. 

Second, Leonard and the class first read what someone has written during the class.  It’s rather ridiculous to waste class time in reading which is why in real seminars the leader and participants read the work to be discussed before the class period.  Then the class time can be devoted to a discussion of the work rather than the reading of it.

Third, Rebeck shows Leonard giving snap judgements of the work he reads as he is reading it based on the false notion that quality automatically leaps out at readers before they have even finished reading a work.  Leonard’s method can’t detect whether the opening of a work is part of an strategy or process that will only become clear by the end.  For one work he doesn’t even get past the first sentence before rejecting it.  His snap judgements are harsh and unfair because they are unconsidered and without context. 

For example, read this sentence below that opens a novel: “In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army.”  One would be quite right in thinking this sentence dull and indeed the entire first chapter of this novel dull, except that it is the first sentence of A Study in Scarlet (1887) by Arthur Conan Doyle, the first of his many Sherlock Holmes novels.  According to the methods of instantly judging texts that we witness in Seminar, Leonard would have rejected this chapter immediately because it does not “grab” him.  He would miss the point that the dullness of the first chapter is meant as a foil for the extraordinary events that follow.   

Besides, Rebeck gives us no notion of what magical qualities Leonard is looking for.  Not only that, she gives us no idea what any of the five, except for Kate, has written about.  It’s a sign of the play’s superficiality that all we know is whether the writers’ work is good or bad rather than what subject matter interests them.  

   

Leonard’s abusive behaviour, besides his sleeping with one of the students, ought to be sufficient grounds for the four writers to terminate their agreement with him.  But, for the needs of her plot, Rebeck has to keep the writers tied to Leonard far longer than is probable or even logical.

Besides the fact that the set-up and execution of the seminar Rebeck depicts is nonsensical, we learn nil about the craft of writing.  All we learn is that to be successful depends not the quality of a writer’s work but on connections.  This ought to be a depressingly cynical conclusion, but Rebeck presents it not only in a positive light but, incredibly, in a sentimental one.

Given the essentially trivial nature of the play, what makes it watchable are the exceptionally fine performances of the cast.  Tom McCamus is excellent as the self-obsessed, venomous Leonard, since he gives us a glimpse that the bizarre fury Leonard vents at his students may have more to do with his own nature than with the students’ works that trigger it.  As his primary opponent, Nathan Howe shows how Martin grows in strength from a hopeless nerd, who is personally too shy and publicly too sulky to cope with the world, into a mature adult ready to acknowledge his flaws and expose hypocrisy unafraid of the consequences.

Andrea Houssin gives a wonderfully rich performance as Kate, who grows from fragility and self-destructiveness to confidence and daring, even if Rebeck gives her character a final, improbable twist.  Rebeck gives the remaining two characters little depth.  Ryan James Miller starts Douglas out as terribly self-satisfied and self-confident only to be turned by Leonard’s criticism into a quivering wreck.  There is nothing in Douglas between these two states, but Miller plays them both to our great amusement.  Grace Lynn Kung plays Izzy, the play’s least developed character.  Rebeck could explore why Izzy seems so self-assured yet also needs a man to gives herself a sense of validation or power, but Rebeck does not.  Nevertheless, Kung does succeed in making us believe that Izzy is something more than the stereotypical Asian temptress that Rebeck has written. 

Under Stewart Arnott’s direction, the timing is perfect and the interplay among the actors is tight.  For those looking for light, inconsequential entertainment supported by a quintet of strong performances, Seminar will fit the bill.  Those who like their comedy with more substance and edge, especially when that edge is not deliberately blunted by sentiment, may find that Seminar is too artificial and empty.  It’s ironic that Rebeck herself should fit so well Leonard’s devastating description of Douglas – slick and self-assured but ultimately hollow. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Tom McCamus, Ryan James Miller, Grace Lynn Kung, Nathan Howe and Andrea Houssin; Nathan Howe and Tom McCamus. ©2015 Dylan Hewlett.

For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.