Posts Tagged ‘Theresa Rebeck’

Rebeck Loses Some Edge but the Cast Does Not in SEMINAR at FPCT

Seminar starts out strong, ripping into the fabric of the business of teaching fiction writing with knife-edged one-liners and characters you love to despise; then, as the plot, the characterizations, and the theme take a hairpin turn, it emerges that, no, the teaching is not a scam after all, the students’ fiction has possibilities, and the characters are not what we thought them. All Rebeck’s hilarious savagery dissipates. Like Rebeck’s writing and show-running for the first season of TV’s Smash, it is a little too affectionate toward the business and the people in it to stay as scathing as Rebeck could and should keep it.

They Do Not Serve Who Only Stand and Wait: THE UNDERSTUDY at Everyman

Both the play and the play-within-the-play preach the same sermon: You may be trying to do something that attains meaning by being witnessed and judged, but in truth no one will ever see you or judge you. As an understudy, you are condemned to eliciting what meaning you can from what one frustrated character in A Chorus Line summed up as “dancing for my own enjoyment.”