Seminar is a play about writers, of both the aspiring and the past-expiration varieties, and, like most plays about writers, it is not especially well-written. There is some kind of nearly inescapable black hole of irony necessitating that plays about writers are not well-written, plays about comedians are not funny, plays about sex are not sexy, plays about politicians are politically illiterate, etc. Why this should be so is a mystery to me, though I suspect that in most cases it has to do with the writer’s approaching a romanticized idea of the thing rather than the thing itself. Of course, a writer of all people should be immune to the romanticizing of writing, but in fact writers are the most susceptible to it: in love with the idea of being a writer rather than with writing itself, which is after all a kind of tedious and lonely form of labor.

Which is not to say that either accuracy or realism is desirable: A realistic play about writing, or about espionage, or about working on Wall Street, or committing adultery, or a few other things one might imagine, would be unbearably boring. But spies and corporate raiders and philanderers actually do something—something that might be worth watching—while writers just sit there and write. So, instead, our writer’s stories are stories about writers feuding, scheming, having affairs, etc., and, inescapably, talking about writing, and talking and talking and talking about it. Listening to writers talk about writing is like