#vougue article

Alan Rickman, as a vainglorious writer, surrounds himself with acolytes in Seminar. In the market for bravura performances that capture the moral complexities and carnal magnetism of larger-than-life figures? Alan Rickman is your man. Over the years, his gift for inhabiting characters from the terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard to the sinister Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films has made him a movie star. But Rickman is also a superb stage actor. And now, nearly 25 years after his electrifying Broadway debut as the doomed seducer Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Rickman is playing another charming monster, in Theresa Rebeck’s nasty, funny new play Seminar, which opens November 20 at the Golden Theatre under the direction of the prodigious Sam Gold (Circle Mirror Transformation). With his white leonine mane and still-unbanked inner fire, the 65-year-old English actor is a natural fit for Leonard, a literary lion in winter who takes on a group of would-be novelists as students and turns their lives upside down. “Every so often you read a play and a character just speaks to you—almost seems to speak through you, in fact,” Rickman says. “With Leonard, all I can do is cross my fingers, get out of the way, and let him come roaring through.” Leonard eviscerates his students and their prose (and, if they’re female, lures them into bed), favoring such blandishments as “whiner,” “whore,” and “television writer.” (As an acting student, Rickman received his share of pedagogical barbs—one teacher told him, “Your voice sounds as if it’s coming out the back end of a drain pipe.”) “Leonard’s a truth teller,” Rickman says. “And if you can handle the truth, if it doesn’t send you to drugs or suicide or the nearest therapist, it will show you how strong you really are.” Here, the gore being spilled belongs to a quartet of attractive young writers, played by a quartet of attractive—and talented—young actors. Lily Rabe (The Merchant of Venice) is an insecure young woman still revising the novel that she started in college; Jerry O’Connell (Jerry Maguire) is a preppy scion on the brink of getting published in The New Yorker; Hamish Link­later (Twelfth Night) is a tortured perfectionist; and Hettienne Park (The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide . . . ) is a sex kitten willing to use her charms to get ahead. “We’ve all had our Leonard,” Rabe says. “Mine was this beautiful ballet teacher who was so evil to us. But at the bottom of his tremendous cruelty was this tremendous love for dance.” In the end, Leonard is redeemed by his commitment to his own art, a quality shared by the man playing him. “Unless we tell stories about ourselves, which is all that theater is, we’re in deep trouble,” Rickman says. “It’s an age-old human need. The lights go down, our thumbs go in our mouths, and someone says, ‘Once upon a time.’ And we believe it.”