The world is their litter box

“Writers are as civilized as feral cats,” says Leonard (Kurt Johnson), early on in Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar, a play about a private fiction-writing workshop that is roughly as cutthroat as The Hunger Games, currently having its West Coast premiere at the B Street Theatre.

Those of us who have survived a few of these workshops—nay, paid for the privilege, often with borrowed money—will see all too quickly the various types that frequent writing graduate programs, workshops, seminars and retreats. There’s the career-obsessed, name-dropping, merely competent brownnoser, Douglas (Dan Fagan); the decadent, promiscuous chick trying to screw her way to publication, Izzy (Tara Sissom); the private-school-educated, unwilling-to-take-risks Kate (Stephanie Altholz); and the intense, poor, hides-his-work-so-you-don’t-know-if-he’s-brilliant-or-awful schmuck, Martin (Joe O’ Malley).

Here’s a hint: Usually, that latter type is awful, not brilliant.

And then there’s Leonard, the relatively well-known writer, only too willing to bust chops and dreams, talking of exotic locales and the holy grail of good writing about something authentic. He drinks too much, sleeps with his students and hasn’t lived up to his potential.

Oh, you’ve been in that workshop, too?

Well, it probably wasn’t this funny. As directed by Buck Busfield, Seminar has plenty of laughs, usually at the expense of pretension—which is fairly easy to laugh at, provided it is not your own. The actors do yeoman’s work, appropriately nuanced; the problem is, it’s impossible to like any of these people. Even if we’re similar to them in some ways, who would want to admit it?

That vaguely uncomfortable feeling remains through the less-than-satisfactory resolution, in which a charge of plagiarism—the worst sin a writer can commit—is bandied about, but not fully explored.

What is clear, though, is that enough feral writers have used the world for their litter box to make Leonard’s opening charge ring true to a wide audience. There are plenty of laughs—apparently, too many for the woman who kept turning around to glare at this critic after each guffaw.

Perhaps not everyone was in the same seminar.