Golden Theatre
New York
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Alan Rickman is “a master of the withering put-down,” said Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Post. Playing a once-great author who now “casually bulldozes his students’ egos” in $5,000 writing seminars, he seems to so enjoy being eloquently cruel that playwright Theresa Rebeck could plausibly have made this a one-man show. Fortunately, a “champion ensemble” has been gathered around Rickman, including the “incomparable” Lily Rabe as an insecure Bennington grad who hosts the sessions at her family’s sprawling Manhattan apartment. The teaching that transpires there consistently owes more to Full Metal Jacket than to Dead Poets Society.
Too bad the script doesn’t also play at other speeds, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Only in the final 15 minutes is Rickman allowed to “embody something more than brisk intellectual sadism”: Handed a genuinely good piece of work, he “responds with a quietly potent mix of antagonism, humility, fear, and something like joy.” Yet even there, Rebeck resorts to a theatrical shortcut: Rickman is once again able to glance at the first pages of a vast manuscript and pass an Olympian judgment on the work. Shorthand mars Rebeck’s characterizations too. From Rabe’s “defensively prickly” Kate to Jerry O’Connell’s smooth-talking preppy to Hettienne Park’s opportunistic sexpot, these aren’t so much people as “highly varnished papier-mâché figures.”
Rebeck’s young writers may be types, but “they are no less believable for their familiarity,” said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. It’s also no stretch to think that this kind of class might be led by a teacher “who hates his students almost as much as he hates himself.” If anything, the audience might wish that Rebeck had followed through with the cynicism that fuels the early scenes. Instead, “everybody in Seminar ends up getting what he or she deserves, which is a pretty good definition of the difference between commercial theater and life.”
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