When literary bad boy Leonard tells the young writers who sign up for his seminar that they are members of a particularly feral species, they are too naive to know what he means. Then, one by one, their claws come out and in short order, the fresh-faced cubs at the center of Theresa Rebeck’s “Seminar” begin to stalk and pounce.
Driven by ambition and hungry for the sort of celebrity that comes with New Yorker clips and Yaddo fellowships, Rebeck’s quartet of aspiring artists pays a steep price for the master class with a teacher who is the coolest and meanest cat of them all.
“Seminar,” which is getting a deliciously biting production at Actor’s Express, is a brutal dark comedy that exposes the underbelly of the Manhattan literary milieu, suggesting it to be a vicious circle where success is more often determined by sex and class than talent and rigor.
Leonard, played to the hilt by the fantastic Andrew Benator, is a celebrated magazine journalist and fiction writer who gets off on torturing (and often bedding) his young charges. First among his victims is the prim and precious Kate (Cara Mantella), a Jane Austen devotee and Bennington College grad who has been working for six years on the same short story and may or may not be in love with the cocky Martin (Barrett Doyle).
Before he can get past the first sentence, Leonard dispatches her labor of love with astounding cruelty. (The seminar, by the way, meets in a capacious New York apartment owned by Kate’s supposedly affluent family; it is designed here with a lovely eye for detail by Phillip Male.)
On the other hand, Leonard takes a shine to the Lolita-like Izzy (Bryn Striepe). Never mind that her writing output only amounts to about a page and a half; she has other assets to be shaped and molded. The preppy and pedigreed Douglas (David Plunkett) gets a fair amount of praise, only to have his talent dismissed as an accident of his famous bloodline. Just the thing New Yorker will go for, Leonard sneers. (Costumes are by Elizabeth Rasmusson, who takes special care to find color-coordinated sweaters, shirts and bow-ties for the snobby, sartorially conservative Douglas.)
Martin, who is shy about showing his work, is eventually singled out as the one true talent in the bunch. That his background mirrors Leonard’s may account for the special treatment and the two engage in a bristling battle that ultimately melts into a display of mushy sentimentality. That tonal shift is a flaw in a play that is otherwise ripe and juicily observed.
Directed by Express artistic chief Freddie Ashley, who also staged Rebeck’s “Mauritius” at this theater in 2009, “Seminar” boasts a universally strong ensemble. Though Doyle’s take on Martin is a little safe and under-explored, Mantella is quite good and Plunkett shows what he’s got in an opening soliloquy in which Douglas extols the virtues of a writer’s colony. It’s a smarmy display of overwrought language with some choice lines that will be mocked by Douglas’ peers as the action wears on.
Benator, let it be said, is giving one of the best performances of the Atlanta theater season. His Leonard is a pitch-perfect jerk of sneering nasality and blistering intensity. As the story unfurls, we come to understand that Leonard’s bitterness is a function of his past. He was a “nobody” whose enormous talent catapulted him to soaring heights and soul-shattering lows. As depicted in “Seminar,” writing is a highly personal blood sport in which anything resembling a slight can cut to the bone.
Theater review
Grade: B
8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays. 2 p.m. Sundays. Through June 16. $23-$47. Actor's Express, 887 W. Marietta Street, Suite J-107, Atlanta. 404-607-7469; actors-express.com
Bottom line: Bristling dark comedy captures predatory instinct of writers.
