Seminar

The web page for Stoneham Theatre's production of "Seminar" warns us: "Recommended for adults. This show contains brief nudity and epic swearing."

What we should be warned about is this: Despite a set that drops the jaw, and some spirited performances, the material itself is hard pressed to rise above the obvious.

Most of the play takes place in the swanky, and rent-controlled, apartment belonging to the family of one of the play's four student characters, Kate (Liz Hayes). (Cross off NYC Literary Hipster Checklist - point one.)

Kate has enrolled in a summer course, a seminar that meets once per week in her nice pad and includes only a small number of select pupils. Among them is Douglas (Jesse Hinson), a talented writer from an established literary lineage. Cross off NYC Literary Hipster Checklist - point two.)

While Kate is an irritable feminist looking to forge a path through a male-dominated world (and what is this, exactly? "Serious" literature versus "chick lit?" David Foster Wallace versus Candice Bushnell?), Douglas is a facile, smarmy fellow for whom words are armor as much as art. Izzy (Sophorl Ngin) is the slutty member of the group, ready and willing to sleep with anyone fun, strategically useful, or, maybe, just available.

For some reason, Martin (Jordan Ahnquist) is irresistibly drawn to Izzy, and it's not just lust. He really does seem to see her as some sort of soulmate. But then again, Martin is the sort of high-strung, uncompromising youth who is full of ideals and just as lacking in life experience. He's always ready to criticize -- but not to show his own work, which is something of a problem in a class that relies on sharing with the group.

Martin's excuse for this shyness is the unsparingly blunt pedagogical style of their professor, Leonard (Christopher Tarjan), a has-been whose style is forever full-steam-ahead; if the unwary get scalded, then let them learn to beware. Leonard seems to embrace the writer's prerogative of living outside society's norms, whether he's jetting off to the world's war-torn regions to write about strife and horror from a close-up and clinical vantage, or sleeping with his undergrads.

He's opinionated and arrogant, and there's no arguing with him; indeed, he sees his job not as a facilitator of conversation, but as an oracle of his own Word, and words. This particular "seminar" is a top-down learning experience, with Leonard dropping pages as quickly as he scans them as though he were shaking leaves out of a tree from his lofty perch.

If this play is about anything, it's words; that being the case, the characters are verbose, and quick to render judgements on written work and on one another. There is plenty of "epic swearing" (cross off another point from the NYC Literary Hipster Checklist) and fervent sex (ditto), but there's little sense that these are four unique or particularly interesting people. They are types -- or tropes; the sort you might find in any young and swinging novel. Their attitudes, arguments, and reactions feel cut and dried and stuck into a tired social script.

Things do liven up toward the end, when the shallow (and mostly blank, book-dominated) set takes on additional color, clutter, and dimension. The play itself does not open or deepen very much in kind; indeed, there's a big reveal that was clearly coming from the moment it was set up earlier, and the ending disappoints insofar as it misses the mark of being inevitable and yet unexpected.

What this play does have is technical competence and scads of style. David Wilson's sound design fits into the play's genre and setting, but glimmers with inspired choices; Christopher Ostrom's set and lighting design contain the cast's energy comfortably, and as to that, the cast give their all.

"Seminar" isn't going to tell you about The Great American Novel, and it's not peopled by anyone who seems a candidate to write one. If it's meant as a critique of the state of the novel in these times, the play suffers from having bought too much into the very problems that hobble much contemporary literature -- profanity in place of resonant dialogue, personalities in place of people. But it does work in the same vigorous, sometimes appealingly vulgar, manner of the airport paperback.