Theresa Rebeck’s new play, Seminar, will receive its world premiere on Broadway when performances begin Oct. 27, prior to an official opening set for Nov. 20, at the John Golden Theatre.
Directed by Obie Award winner Sam Gold (Circle Mirror Transformation, The Aliens, Tigers Be Still, Kin, The Coward), Seminar will star Tony Award nominee Alan Rickman (Private Lives, Les Liaisons Dangereuses) as a world-famous writer with power over young scribes in his class. The cast also includes Tony nominee Lily Rabe (The Merchant of Venice), Jerry O’Connell, Hettienne Park and Hamish Linklater.
Here, Playbill Video meets Gold and the cast at a press day for the world-premiere production. Members of the Seminar cast chat about their characters and talk about the themes of the upcoming production.
Seminar, according to the producers, is about “four young writers who are thrilled to be participating in a private seminar taught by the brilliant but unpredictable Leonard (Rickman), an international literary legend. But as Leonard deems some students more promising than others, tensions arise. Sex is used as a weapon, alliances are made and broken, and it’s not just the wordplay that turns vicious…”
We are happy to welcome guest celebrity blogger playwright Theresa Rebeck, a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose plays include Broadway’s Mauritius and Off-Broadway’s Omnium Gatherum (co-written with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros), Bad Dates, Spike Heels, The Understudy, Loose Knit, The Butterfly Collection, The Water’s Edge, The Scene, Our House and more. Rebeck, whose play The Novelist will be presented at the Dorset Theatre Festival in August, has blogged for Playbill.com all week; her final entry follows.
Last year I got myself in a lot of trouble by writing a blog about how Agatha Christie wasn’t so bad. The Dorset Theater Festival had presented a pretty good production of one of her many plays, and the audience was just lapping it up, and I got to thinking that doing plays that audiences might actually like was a pretty good idea. Everybody’s always nervous about how theatre audiences are shrinking, or getting older, and how are we going to get them to come back? For me the answer has always been, well, maybe we should produce plays that they like.
That doesn’t mean Agatha Christie, necessarily, or even at all; I’m a living playwright, I think everyone should produce more new plays rather than just keep doing revivals. I do hear from many sources—producers and managing directors, usually—that “audiences don’t like new plays” but I don’t believe it. I think audiences like new plays. They certainly liked them when Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were writing them. Why would they change their minds? They liked Mauritius and The Scene and The Understudy. They liked The History Boys, and that was a play about a bunch of kids going to a British public school. But it was a very interesting and entertaining contemporary play, by the esteemed Alan Bennett, and it had great characters and some very good jokes, and some striking moments and, well, audiences liked it.
We are happy to welcome guest celebrity blogger playwright Theresa Rebeck, a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose plays include Broadway’s Mauritius and Off-Broadway’s Omnium Gatherum (co-written with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros), Bad Dates, Spike Heels, The Understudy, Loose Knit, The Butterfly Collection, The Water’s Edge, The Scene, Our House and more. Rebeck, whose play The Novelist will be presented at the Dorset Theatre Festival in August, will blog for Playbill.com all week; her fourth entry follows.
All things Novelist are heating up. The theatrical publishers Smith and Kraus have a new program called Plays In Production, and they publish beautiful little one-off paperbacks of a play script, which you can buy in the lobby. (It’s just like what they do in London, with new plays.) So they’re going to do one for The Novelist and the Dorset Theater Festival. This means I have to finish rewrites and write a preface and come up with a decent photograph for the front cover and clever copy for the back. And then I go back to New York for rehearsals next week, and then we move the whole production up here.
We are happy to welcome guest celebrity blogger playwright Theresa Rebeck, a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose plays include Broadway’s Mauritius and Off-Broadway’s Omnium Gatherum (co-written with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros), Bad Dates, Spike Heels, The Understudy, Loose Knit, The Butterfly Collection, The Water’s Edge, The Scene, Our House and more. Rebeck, whose play The Novelist will be presented at the Dorset Theatre Festival in August, will blog for Playbill.com all week; her third entry follows.
My second novel came out about two months ago. It’s called “Twelve Rooms With A View,” and it’s really quite good, very funny and about something all New Yorkers care about: real estate. It’s about other things too. I recommend it highly.
Writing that second novel almost killed me. My lit agent warned me that it would. The fact is—this is a fact that I really didn’t know until it fell on my head—nobody really knows how to write novels. The first one you write on arrogance and adrenaline. Then it gets published and does well and you think, “Excellent, time to do it again!” And it is at that moment when you realize that you had no idea, really, about how to do it in the first place and it’s virtually inexplicable, frankly, how the first one happened. Seriously, sometimes I go back and look at pages from my first novel and think, “Wow, that’s pretty good, who wrote this?” Even though I know very well it was me.
So the second novel is an exercise in sheer terror. I have a lot of friends who are staring down the barrel of their second novel, and I have to say I’m really glad my pushy agent kept telling me to just finish it and get it over with. Now I’m on to my third, which is more pleasant. I have that Malcolm Gladwell book lying around my house, and supposedly it explains that if you do something for 10,000 hours you get really good at it. I am hoping to get good at writing novels.
We are happy to welcome guest celebrity blogger playwright Theresa Rebeck, a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose plays include Broadway’s Mauritius and Off-Broadway’s Omnium Gatherum (co-written with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros), Bad Dates, Spike Heels, The Understudy, Loose Knit, The Butterfly Collection, The Water’s Edge, The Scene, Our House and more. Rebeck, whose play The Novelist will be presented at the Dorset Theatre Festival in August, will blog for Playbill.com all week; her second entry follows.
Somebody told me a couple weeks ago that summer stock is dying. He made it sound like one of the stepping stones to the inevitable end of culture. No one wants theater anymore, so of course they don’t want summer theater, especially in a recession. Summer stock is a big old lumbering dinosaur which just can’t survive. And then fiction will die and poetry is already dead.
That is not my experience up here in Dorset, Vermont. The Dorset Theater Festival presents a four-show season in one of those great old barn theaters, starting in late June and running through the end of August. It fell upon hard times the past few seasons, which had to do with a myriad of different factors which no one really wants to talk about because people here aren’t all that interested in wallowing in past mistakes; they’re more interested in figuring out how to make things work. Honestly, Vermont reminds me of China. Everybody is so pragmatic.
So this year, the Dorset Theater Festival hired Dina Janis to take over as Artistic Director. Dina lives in Dorset with her husband and two sons. When she was a kid, she grew up in the Chicago Playboy Mansion because her father, who was a musician, played the Playboy circuit and he dragged everyone along with him, and in between gigs that’s where they crashed and then finally they just ended up living there. Then, when she hit high school, Dina studied with Barbara Greener, along with Gary Sinise and Jeff Perry, and they started producing theater in church basements out in Highland Park, and that led to starting their own company, which they called Steppenwolf. Then Dina decided it was time to go to New York to study on her own, which she did. The last few years she’s been teaching at Bennington College and hosting New York theater companies like LAByrinth, who come up and work with her and her students during the summer.
We are happy to welcome guest celebrity blogger playwright Theresa Rebeck, a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose plays include Broadway’s Mauritius and Off-Broadway’s Omnium Gatherum (co-written with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros), Bad Dates, Spike Heels, The Understudy, Loose Knit, The Butterfly Collection, The Water’s Edge, The Scene, Our House and more. Rebeck, whose play The Novelist will be presented at the Dorset Theatre Festival in August, will blog for Playbill.com all week; her first entry follows.
I am, as I write this, on board the Puritan, the Amtrak train which runs from Penn Station up through Poughkeepsie to Albany. There I’ll disembark at the Rensselaer Station, pick up my little Prius—which really does get 50 miles to the gallon, for those who wonder—and then I will drive back to Dorset, Vermont, where it’s not so unbelievably hot you can’t walk down the street without freaking out.
My family owns a little farmhouse in Dorset, which we bought four years ago because the summer in New York is too hot. We were poking around and thinking about someplace to go, where it wouldn’t be so hot, and we looked at a lot of houses closer to the city. We had friends who had homes in Columbia County and out on Long Island, and we would go visit them and think, How About Here? But nothing really seemed right. The ocean was nice out on Long Island but there was too much sand at the beach. Columbia County was nice but there were so many New Yorkers there.
Then we went up to Dorset to visit our friends Bill and Donna. We sat in their crazy big back yard and ate tomatoes that Donna grew there. We walked through forests of trees and ferns and wildflowers. Our kids spent hours wading in the creek and building dams. We read little green plaques about Ethan Allen and how Vermont used to be a republic. We went to a tavern that was built before the Revolutionary War!
Next thing you knew we owned a little farmhouse that looks like a magician might live there, on the bank of a small creek, at the end of a long road. It’s kind of hard to get to, frankly; it takes about four-and-a-half hours to drive up from Brooklyn. But in the summer, it’s cool and breezy. In the winter, there’s still snow. In autumn, the colors of the trees will blow your mind. And, there’s a fantastic little theater, which does four shows every summer. Which, ironically, is why I spent the weekend in hot New York.
