The writing life: Theresa Rebeck's "Seminar' at PTC

"Write what you know" is a trite cliché but also sage advice. The world is so screwed up, I have often observed, because the people who know things— academics, for example— don't know how to communicate, and the communicators— like journalists and writers— don't know anything. If writers hung out less with each other and more with scholars— or factory workers, bureaucrats, salespeople, welfare mothers, gangsters, you name it— the world would be better informed.

Unfortunately, the only thing many writers know well, and write about, is themselves. That's why so many plays and screenplays are written about writers and/or the making of plays and movies.

Woody Allen is perhaps the worst offender in this regard. Many of his protagonists are writers, yet they serve merely as vehicles for some creative gimmick, as when Allen's young would-be novelist Gil steps through a time warp to meet Hemingway, Fitzgerald et al. in Midnight in Paris. Allen's films convey no real sense of the struggle to put words on paper (Gil says he's struggling but provides no evidence, and he has a conveniently rich fiancée, to boot).

Nor does Allen seem conversant with any aspect of real life other than writing (think of Match Point, which touches on tennis, business, crime and police work without demonstrating any apparent understanding of how these things really work).

Rebeck branches out

The playwright Theresa Rebeck is another serial offender. As I suggested two years ago in my review of The Understudy, theater seems to be the only subject that interests her. But unlike Woody Allen, Rebeck possesses an intimate and passionate knowledge of her subject, a strong point of view, the wit to engage an audience's attention and a genuine interest in the ways people relate to each other— even if the only people she cares about are writers, actors and directors.

(Full disclosure: My daughter worked under Rebeck last year as a writer-producer for "Smash," the NBC TV series about, yes, the mounting of a Broadway musical.)

With Seminar, Rebeck has at least ventured beyond the narrow world of the stage to the more challenging and relatively unplowed terrain of short-story writing. This drama takes us into a big old apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where four aspiring writers have plunked down $5,000 each to have their works dissected with brutal honesty once a week by Leonard, a once-brilliant novelist who, having apparently lost his mojo, now survives by editing and teaching.

Drill sergeant

The four students comprise a convenient study in extremes. Douglas (played by Luigi Sottile in the Philadelphia Theatre Company's production) has already enjoyed some minor success, thanks to his connections and family name, which has vastly inflated his ego: "I'm as curious about the inside of my brain as anyone," he airily informs his colleagues. Izzy (Teresa Avia Lim) displays no discernible talent other than blind ambition.

Kate, the most interesting of the four (a rounded and nuanced performance by Geneviève Perrier), is a rich girl with a Bennington degree whose writing appears to have suffered because she's never suffered. Conversely, Martin (Matt Harrington) is a mess— he has no money, no job, no home and no plan— but he just may be the only real writer in the room.

Their intimidating teacher, Leonard— played with appropriately withering contempt by Rufus Collins— is the literary equivalent of a Marine drill sergeant: Only the strong will survive his humiliating brand of basic training, but those who come out alive will be better for the experience. Or so the theory goes.

Group therapy

Of course Seminar is not a writing class, but a play about a writing class. Rebeck is a dramatist, not a social scientist. She may keenly understand writers and writing, but above all she possesses an astute sense of how to command our attention and move the action along.

So in Seminar she refrains from burdening us with actual evaluations of writing. Instead, in Rebeck's hands this writing class quickly degenerates into a therapy group where mind games take priority over literary concerns.

Here Leonard gets his rocks off by belittling or seducing his young charges. The students get their rocks off by rebelling against Leonard's power trip ("He can't do it any more," Martin suggests, "so he's mean to young writers"), by forming constantly shifting alliances, and by playing musical beds with each other and with Leonard.

Feral cats?

The result, at one level, is a remarkable feat: a rare comic drama that insightfully engages us in the world of writers and writing without actually subjecting us to the tedious and lonely writing process itself. In the hands of director Scott Schwartz and his capable cast, 90 minutes of talk about prose becomes surprisingly enjoyable and thought provoking.

The problem, at least in terms of reality, is that most really good writers aren't nearly as interesting as Rebeck's characters. "Writers in their natural state," one character sardonically remarks, "are about as civilized as feral cats." Yet most good writers I know— Buzz Bissinger excepted— are anything but feral.

The greatest writers (and editors too— the late William Shawn of The New Yorker and Alan Halpern of Philadelphia Magazine spring to mind) are often inordinately shy, boring and decidedly non-confrontational people; they're great literary figures precisely because they relate better to (and care more about) abstract symbols like letters and words than real people. The witty comebacks that Rebeck's writers toss off with such aplomb (e.g., Leonard responding to an insult from Martin, "You probably never told off your father") are the sort of repartee that most writers commit to paper precisely because they're not fast enough on their feet to utter it in conversation.

Two kinds of writers

But perhaps Rebeck has unearthed— either deliberately or inadvertently— a subtle but profound point here. There are actually two kinds of writers in the world: those who want to write— presumably because they have something to say— and those who want to be writers— presumably for the acclaim and the lifestyle. Rebeck's characters in Seminar clearly belong in the latter group.

The tipoff comes toward the end, when Leonard challenges Martin: "Do you want to be a writer, or not?" He does not say, "Do you want to write?" These characters seem not to understand— and maybe Rebeck doesn't either— that good writing isn't an end in itself; it's a means to a greater end, which is communication. And communication basically boils down to two things: You must have something to say, and you must understand to whom you're saying it.

"You'll still be a fucking servant," Leonard goads Martin, when Martin stubbornly refuses to let Leonard see his work, "because you said, "'I don't need help'." To Rebeck, servant seems a pejorative term. But to my mind, writing is a matter of connecting with other people— whether it's one person or ten million, and whether they live in the present or the future. That involves humbly serving one's audience (or posterity) rather than pompously seeking to master it.

My classroom advice

To the extent that Rebeck ridicules aspiring writers who believe they can master an essentially solitary craft by rubbing elbows with other writers, she's right on the money. Having taught writing classes myself, I've often felt the whole enterprise is a rip-off.

On the first day of class, I used to tell my students, "Very few of you will ever make a living as a writer, or even be published. But if you know how to form a declarative sentence, you'll be ahead of 90 percent of the people in whatever field you ultimately pursue." As Byron would put it, that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.♦


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