Todd is my slave name

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...