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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Monster class

November 25, 2011 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on the premiere of Seminar, Theresa Rebeck’s new play. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
rickman200_1321639182.jpgNobody does nasty like Alan Rickman, and in “Seminar,” Theresa Rebeck’s new play, he goes the whole hog, playing a monstrously brutal teacher who hates his students almost as much as he hates himself. It’s no surprise that the man who brought Severus Snape to the screen should be so good at spewing verbal cyanide onstage. To hear him dismiss a short story written by one of his hapless charges as “a soul-sucking waste of words” is to know what a mouse feels like as it peers down the mouth of an ill-fed snake. What’s surprising and gratifying about “Seminar” is that Ms. Rebeck, a prolific playwright with a hit-or-miss average, should have connected so firmly with the dramatic ball this time at bat. Like “The Understudy,” her last play, “Seminar” is an intermission-free comedy that gets serious at the halfway point, and for all the shiny slickness of its surface, Ms. Rebeck has once again contrived to conjure up a stageful of too-clever-for-their-own-good characters who’ll sneak right under your skin.
The premise of “Seminar” requires explaining, since it will undoubtedly be alien to anyone who hasn’t dipped a toe into the creative-writing racket. Mr. Rickman plays Leonard, a burned-out novelist turned high-octane book editor who makes extra cash on the side by leading private seminars in The Fine Art of Getting Published. Pony up $5,000 and you get to participate in 10 kick-me sessions at which he tells a small group of up-and-coming young writers what dim-witted boobs they are…
It goes without saying that Mr. Rickman is the star of the show. Ms. Rebeck has given him a lengthy speech about unsuccessful writers (“You’ll feel like you’re in the ninth circle of hell, where the betrayers of Christ are frozen in eternal cannibalistic silence”) that he delivers as if it were an operatic aria, using his hissing, sinister drawl to color each phrase so tellingly that you’ll catch your breath from start to finish. But “Seminar” is in no way a one-man show, and Mr. Rickman’s “supporting” cast backs him brilliantly and effortlessly….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

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About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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