If there was one thing I learned
from my first semi-official theater review (I refer to my review of the
Hamilton College Theatre Department production of Woyzeck, which you can find on the Hamilton College Spectator website here), it was that set
design is a damned important part of
any production. Of course, Woyzeck was
not my first theater experience in which the set played a huge role. I saw a
traditionally barebones production of Wilder’s Our Town in high school and could not help but recognize the importance of the set.
But not until Woyzeck did the open-ended possibilities of set design strike me.
So it was with great curiosity
that I observed the set design of Seminar,
the Broadway play written by Theresa Rebeck and directed by Sam Gold, which I saw last week. I should
note that the set doesn’t change for almost the entirety of the play; with the
exception of the final scene, the entire play takes place in the living room of
the Manhattan apartment of Kate (Lily Rabe), an aspiring young writer, who, along
with fellow young writers Martin (Hamish Linklater), Douglas (Jerry O’Connell),
and Izzy (Hettienne Park), decides to take part in a seminar with over-the-hill novelist and writer Leonard (Alan Rickman).
It goes without saying that
Rickman is the star of the show. He is thoroughly unpleasant, constantly
irritable, and totally hilarious. The wicked barbs that Leonard tosses at the
young writers might be funny enough coming from another actor, but Rickman's inhabitation of the character is perfect. Best known
as the wonderfully ambivalent Professor Snape in the Harry Potter film
franchise, Rickman digs into the same tortured teacher psyche, but provides less
of a moral force and more of a lecherous, freewheeling sensibility in the character of Leonard.
But as much as the play
celebrates Rickman’s wicked humor, there are several understated aspects to the
play that might largely escape the notice of the audience. As aforementioned, I latched
on to set design as a personal interest in the play. The set of Kate’s living
room, it turns out, would have been wholly unremarkable without the contrast of
the second set—the living room of Leonard’s loft. Given the relevance of
literature in the play, it shouldn’t be surprising that the central difference
between the two sets is their treatment of books.
In Kate’s apartment, the books
are treated as ornamental objects; in one bookshelf, the books are arranged by
the color of their spines to loosely form a rainbow. The books become superficial—mere
props. On the other hand, the books in Leonard’s apartment are the opposite of
decoration. They are scattered haphazardly across the entire room: piled on
furniture, stacked on the floor, overflowing Leonard’s desk.
This might seem merely an empty distinction
but for the shifting attitude towards books that accompanies the change in set. While
the characters stomp and snarl through Kate’s apartment, they focus on the
author rather than on the literature. The play largely consists (as one would expect) of author-related
squabbles—Martin doesn’t like Douglas; Kate is in love with Martin; Izzy is a
nymphomaniac—until the final scene. Well, I should admit that the squabbles continue, but the real climax of the play is Martin’s discovery of a novel
manuscript written by Leonard.
When Leonard protests Martin’s
reading of the manuscript, Martin proclaims, “It doesn’t belong to you anymore!”
Somewhat unclearly, he finishes, “It belongs to itself.” Suddenly, the novel is
disconnected from its author. What’s fascinating is that Martin does not offer that the novel belongs to everyone. The novel simply is itself. But
the set design reinforces that sense of the novel’s independence; books are
important in their own right in Leonard’s loft in a way that they were not in Kate’s
living room.
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