Theresa Rebeck (Emily Anne Epstein for The Observer)

The NBC drama Smash, returning for its second season early next year, offered a backstage look at a fictional Broadway production. Much of the show’s dramatic tension involved the musical’s writers’ effort to tell an honest story in the face of intense market pressure.

Creator Theresa Rebeck didn’t realize it at the time, but she was also writing her own epitaph as the program’s showrunner.

Like the Broadway musical at its center, Smash was also subject to intense commercial forces. The first season’s finale, in which the newly minted star belts a tune called “Don’t Forget Me,” turned out to be Ms. Rebeck’s last episode. Her departure was announced in March.

She rebounded quickly. By June, Ms. Rebeck, a prominent playwright—her Mauritius ran on Broadway in 2007 and her Seminar in 2011—was headed back to the Great White Way with a new play, Dead Accounts, which opens Thursday at the Music Box Theatre. The story of a Cincinnati family dealing with the ghosts of the past, its production boasts a rather Smash-ian twist: it's the second Broadway production starring Katie Holmes.

Ms. Holmes is in the midst of a comeback of her own, having just survived the biggest and most contentious celebrity divorce of the past decade. That she’s chosen a serious turn on Broadway as her next chapter is particularly interesting, in that she is largely playing a supporting role.

“They just have to be able to act,” Ms. Rebeck said of casting celebrities. “I understand why it’s important to theaters to have actors of some visibility. I do. They just have to be really careful that it’s somebody that can do the part.”

Ms. Holmes’s character, Lorna, is quiet, small and very Midwestern, a compulsive dieter who receives a visit by her brother (played by two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz), back in town after a mysteriously lucrative time in New York.

It’s a little like Ms. Rebeck’s own experience, in fact—a quick return to the theater after her no doubt well-compensated, if creatively bruising, brush with prime-time television.

Smash, it should be noted, wasn’t just any show. Executive produced by Steven Spielberg, who had been developing the idea for years, it came with a reality-TV twist: if the musical within a series was deemed worthy, it would actually be produced on Broadway (spoiler alert: it wasn’t). The pilot, which is said to have cost NBC $7.5 million to produce, was heavily promoted during the Super Bowl. It was an event.

Reviews and ratings were solid, at first. But both began to take a negative turn as the weeks went on.

The problems on Smash, Ms. Rebeck said, stemmed from producers’ demands that the characters behave in ways their creator thought incoherent.

“One of the points of contention last year was that the network thinks they have the right to say to the writer of the show, ‘We don’t want her to do this. We want her to do this,’” Ms. Rebeck recalled. “And I would sometimes say back to them, ‘She would never do that.’ And they’d look at me like I was crazy, and I’d be like, ‘Nope, it’s not crazy, it’s just who the character is.’ You have to respect who the character is. It has its own internal truth and you can’t betray that. And if you don’t betray that, it will not betray you. There is this sort of sense that if you don’t fuck with the muse—if you don’t fuck with the muse, the muse will stand by you."

Ms. Rebeck compared her function on Smash to that of an architect, but noted that NBC viewed her more as a general contractor. “If they say, ‘Take the wall out,’ and you say, ‘I can’t take the wall out, the building will fall down’—but they don’t want to hear that! It turns into bigger questions about power and art, power and storytelling. Is power itself bigger than storytelling? And I would say no.”

Hardly an innocent when it comes to negotiating the tricky terrain of art and commerce, Ms. Rebeck was an Emmy nominee as a producer of NYPD Blue, and has plenty of experience balancing the dictates of the muse with the demands of network suits. “The better executives understand that there’s supposed to be tension and respect, but a lot of them are just like ‘Do it. You don’t own it. Just do it.’ That’s not a level playing field; you can’t have a true discussion. You just get a lot of money. Everybody has to make those choices. Absolutely everybody. Sometimes I see movies and go, ‘Oh. Ew. Did Julia Roberts need another $20 million? Because it’s the only reason she would be doing that.’ Why did that person do that? It must be for the money.”

Dead Accounts, which is set in Ms. Rebeck’s hometown of Cincinnati and was first produced in that city’s Playhouse in the Park, is about people rather like Ms. Rebeck’s family—or even herself, had she not made an early escape (she compared herself to Ms. Holmes’s character, who is less brilliant than hard-working). Both siblings deal with an ailing father, perpetually vacillating in health offstage, a meddling, overbearing mother who just wants everyone to be happy (played by Jayne Houdyshell), and shared memories that mean far more to sister than to brother. He’s left the region behind and would prefer not to be back at all.

Though Ms. Rebeck has a fondness for certain aspects of the Midwest, she came to the East Coast for college, attending Brandeis, and soon wound up in New York: “I really was the person who was desperate to get out of Ohio on some level,” she said.

The politics seem to have been especially grating—the abortion issue, for instance. “Somehow people got sold this bill of goods that as long as you are pro-life and other people are pro-choice, that gives you a sort of moral superiority,” she said. “You don’t have to think of anything else.”

Growing up, she said, she never quite fit in. “I was not really ‘of that place,’” she explained. “Then I came to New York, and I don’t really feel of this place either, though there’s certainly much more here that suits my temperament.”

Her temperament also lands her between two poles artistically—more pragmatic than most Pulitzer-nominated playwrights, yet artsier than many TV showrunners. “In the theater, it’s a kind of clubby environment,” she noted. “I didn’t go to an Ivy League. There’s a thing in New York: ‘Did you go to an Ivy?’ ‘Did you go to Yale?’ “Oh, you’re from the Midwest.’ ‘Oh, you’re a girl.’” With advanced degrees from Brandeis and limited interest in postmodernism and other dramaturgical trends, Ms. Rebeck felt out of place in the city, where she’d arrived with her then-boyfriend, now-husband in tow (he’s from Kansas).

“There were a lot of obstacles to overcome,” she went on, “but people seemed to respond to my plays. There was a place for them, but not really a place for me.”

Did it hurt her prospects, this outsider status?

“No,” she said. “It hurt my feelings. It didn’t hurt my career.”

Ms. Rebeck is very conscious of Eastern snobbery. Her family, her characters and her star (Ms. Holmes is from Toledo, a jaunt up I-75) all come in for mockery from pretentious city slickers.

“[Midwesterners] see the culture—and I have to say I don’t think they’re wrong about this aspect of it—as kind of degrading,” she said. “The way sexuality is portrayed, so much violence, the carelessness. I respect their impatience with that aspect of the culture. At one point I said to my husband, the networks would put kiddie porn on if they were allowed.” (Ah, for those halcyon days when a glimpse of Det. Andy Sipowicz’s butt was deemed risqué ...)

Smash is hardly kiddie porn, but it did represent Midwesterners as rubes and New Yorkers as savvy: when the show’s protagonist of sorts, Karen Cartwright—who’s utterly blind to the dynamics of power that run the theater world and New York in general—returns home to Iowa, she’s greeted by parents who ever-so-gently try to crush her dreams. While Ms. Rebeck noted that the show was never intended to focus so heavily on Karen (played by Katharine McPhee), she added, “People found her to be a very attractive character, so they asked me to write that. I was okay with it. I was like, I’ve got that in my back pocket.”

The original cast of 'Seminar' takes a bow (Getty)

Despite rave reviews for Alan Rickman and the cast of Theresa Rebeck's caustic comedy of literature and sex, Seminar, the Broadway show shuttered last Sunday in a whimper, not a bang. This blow came one month after an almost complete turnover in the cast, with new members Justin Long, Zoe Lister-Jones, and Jeff Goldblum taking over from Hamish Linklater, Lily Rabe, and Mr. Rickman, respectively.

Seminar, a five-person play about privileged creative writing students receiving private lessons from a washed-up, curmudgeonly ex-literary superstar named Leonard, may have suffered with the casting overhaul, though an insider told The New York Observer that the show was axed after receiving zero Tony nominations. (Though it has been nominated as Best Play of the 2011/2012 Season by the Outer Critics Circle and The Drama League.)

Rickman, center.

I’ve never been a fan of Alan Rickman’s tight-lipped, prissy-mouthed acting style, but sometimes he picks a role that fits like a knee-high nylon sock, in a play that suits his nasal, slanty-eyed mannerisms with the sound of two hands clapping instead of one. The result in Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar, at the Golden, is a blessing. In fact, the entire cast of five is a marvel of well-oiled introspection, which is certainly a good thing, because without them, the enjoyable but often untidy and uneven play would be nothing more than a lot of clever one-liners.

Mr. Rickman plays Leonard, a sour, disillusioned, once-respected author who mysteriously gave up writing to take up copy editing at Random House. Impoverished and bitter, he now teaches writing workshops for pretentious young hopefuls with ambitions to write the great American novel. His current seminar is set in an $800-a-month rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side with nine rooms and a river view belonging to one of the four students in the class who have shelled out $5,000 apiece to impress each other by dispensing earth-shattering undergraduate proclamations such as “Kerouac is a misogynist hack” and “Post-modernism has really fallen on hard times.” The students are Kate (riveting Lily Rabe, who looks more like her mother, Jill Clayburgh, every time I see her), the wealthy, overeducated pseudointellectual Bennington graduate whose apartment serves as a makeshift classroom; Izzy (Hettienne Park), an Asian sexpot whose ambition is to write the kind of steamy stuff that will land her on the cover of New York magazine and bares her breasts to prove she’s ready for the task; Douglas (Jerry O’Connell), a preppie dude who learns to his horror that he’s cut out for nothing better than junky Hollywood screenplays; and Martin (Hamish Linklater), a skinny snob who annoys everyone by acting like a member of the semantics police (“Inigo! You said ‘Indigo Jones.’ It’s Inigo!”). Secretly, they all want to win the approval of their teacher, but what they get is humiliation, insults, discouragement and a torrent of colorful four-letter words that reduces them all to little more than literary larvae. Ms. Rebeck cusses more than David Mamet, but is more amusing than deadly.

Nothing they come up with discussing and dissecting each other’s work rouses the hooded eyelids of their pompous ass of a leader. He calls them whores, dismisses their stories as hollow and chides them for knowing nothing about what they are writing about—like, for instance, the world. He has traveled the globe rubbing elbows with HIV patients, Rwanda genocide survivors and “a Russian prostitute of indeterminate gender” who inspired him. Why can’t they experience life before they attempt to describe it in a “soul-sucking waste of words”? A story Kate has been working on for six years is trashed in one sentence for lack of relevance. (“I don’t have to go beyond the first five words, because I don’t give a shit!” he attacks.) While Leonard takes a two-week break from the 10-week seminar to inspect the damage in Somalia, the group begins to suspect maybe they’re being ripped off. Since no seminar I’ve ever attended in the craft of fiction writing (or anything else) has ever been taught by such a cruel, mean-spirited sadist, I began to suspect Ms. Rebeck’s plausibility quotient is lacking.

To ease her depression, Kate wolfs down bags of chips, liters of Coca-Cola, quarts of Ben & Jerry’s and bowls of raw cookie dough, necessitating a lot of food props. This trash food explosion is shared by Martin, who has now become her roommate. The group begins to plot a strategy to expose their teacher as a phony. When Leonard returns, Kate presents him with a memoir about a Cuban transvestite gang leader written by someone she met at Bennington. Leonard finally loves something so much that he wants to meet the author. The joke is that Kate wrote it herself to prove the teacher’s theories about “write what you know” ridiculous. But Douglas goes one better—accusing Leonard of plagiarism in his early work. Stripped of stature, dignity and even identity, Leonard becomes a marble parody of failure. Or is he? Does he end up a poseur or a creative inspiration? It isn’t until the play’s final scene (shockingly sentimental, considering the cynical nature of the material) that we discover what Leonard’s motives are, and how he plans to make his talent count. For a master craftsman in mannerisms bordering on madness, Mr. Rickman is captivating. You can almost see the spit harden in the corners of his pursed lips, while the blood coagulates in his narrowed eyes. This happens in all of his roles, and he usually plays them all the same way. This time he’s doubly malevolent, but curiously charming.

I’m not at all sure what Ms. Rebeck hopes we will take home with us from Seminar, but I am convinced the point of the play is that there is no point at all. It meekly points out the fact, underscored by abrasive, hostile monologues, that fiction is dead, Hollywood is the only way to make money as a writer, and accepting teaching jobs in the wilderness of dream shredding is the answer for desperate failures to pay off their credit cards. It takes one hour and thirty minutes for Leonard (and Mr. Rickman) to reveal their secret vulnerability, and for Ms. Rebeck to map out what happened to the four students in the seminar. I’m afraid I found that final scene in Leonard’s cluttered, book-strewn hovel, in which you find out how everyone turns out, disappointingly contrived and frankly unbelievable.

But don’t be deterred. Theresa Rebeck is sloppy at structure, but she creates interesting characters and writes dialogue that is pungent, contemporary and smart. Director Sam Gold moves everyone around in groups, like chess pieces, with a level of competence that is thrilling in its thoroughness, and it’s a tribute to perfect casting that the actors find the subtext to their characters that is not always evident in the writing. I said earlier that Seminar is uneven and I meant it. But all told, it’s not a bad evening, and sometimes it’s even a good deal better than that.

rreed@observer.com

Ms. Rebeck’s last New York offering, Mauritius, which played on Broadway two seasons ago and was also very funny, although much darker and tenser—no relaxation there!—was set in the cloak-and-dagger world of duplicitous philatelists.

With The Understudy, which opened a week ago at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Off Broadway space, the Laura Pels Theatre, she’s in more familiar theatrical territory. The Understudy is a backstage comedy, and it’s about three of those lonely cogs.

Harry is a frustrated and bitter actor who has been cast as an understudy in the Broadway transfer of a successful and movie-star-driven production of an apocryphal long-lost Kafka play. He’s sarcastic and snide and contemptuous of the stars, especially the one he’s understudying, who has just released a blockbuster action flick in which his main obligation, according to Harry, is to yell “Get in the truck!” with gravity and intensity and taut pecs.

Jake is that action star, who is both convinced he’s a big deal and frustrated he’s less important than the play’s main star, the absent Bruce, who makes $22 million per picture (Jake got only $2.3 million for his action film).

Finally, there’s Roxanne, the super-competent stage manager, who, it turns out, was engaged to Harry until he left her, not quite at the altar but very close to it. She’s trying to get through this rehearsal, managing Jake’s ego and Harry’s petulance and an unseen stoner stagehand who consistently runs the wrong cues.

Julie White plays Roxanne, and it’s impossible not to adore her. (It is, I suspect, impossible not to adore her in anything. When she won her Tony Award for Little Dog Laughed three years ago, she left me less impressed with the play: If she could render a mere acceptance speech so memorably hilarious and moving, who’s to say Douglas Carter Beane’s script was necessarily any good?) She’s funny, as always, but here she’s also convincingly hurt and angry.

Justin Kirk, best known as the devilishly lovable brother-in-law Andy on Weeds, is Harry, and he brings a similar sarcastic charm to this role that he does to his TV character. That persona can grow just a touch grating—one must have affects other than snide, no?—but there’s real chemistry, based on a shared sarcastic sensibility, between him and Ms. White.

It’s hardest to judge Mark-Paul Gosselaar, who is beloved by a generation—my generation—as Zach Morris, the troublemaking popular kid of Saved by the Bell’s Bayside High. Somewhat stiff and often obviously emphatic, is he a good actor playing a bad actor, or is he a mediocre actor doing his best? In truth, either way works, which might be the mark of perfect stunt casting.

There’s some convenience to the script. If Jake thinks he’s too big a star to be understudied by a nobody like Harry, why is he simultaneously understudying for Bruce? (It provides a setup for the two of them to be at rehearsal together, but it doesn’t quite make sense.) It’s tough to tell whether we’re supposed to think the Kafka script they’re rehearsing is any good—the few lines of dialogue we hear from it aren’t, and we’re supposed to take it as a joke each time Jake starts speaking rapturously of Kafka’s genius (the character is a dolt who thinks he’s smart), but then, the two smart characters seem impressed by the play, too. And while I can accept the characters’ regular bathroom breaks and forgotten hand props to get one or another offstage for a tête-à-tête between the other two, don’t you think eventually they’d remember the fictional theater’s intercom system and stop revealing secrets that their offstage colleagues inevitably overhear?

But those are small quibbles. It’s a fun night at the theater. Near the end, after all that’s gone wrong—moving sets, broken relationships, fights—Jake and Harry have been preparing to rehearse a big dance scene. There’s one more bit of bad news, but, like Peggy Lee in that song, they just keep dancing. It’s a funny ending to a funny play, and not a bad outlook on life, either.

I WISH I could tell you something about what happens in Idiot Savant, the latest spectacle from the experimental playwright Richard Foreman, which opened last week at the Public Theater. But I can’t; despite sitting through it and reading the script, I have no idea.

This is apparently all right, however, and may be the point: “I defy you to try to give a synopsis of any of Foreman’s plays,” writes Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, in a note in the Playbill. O.K., Oskar, you win.

But Mr. Eustis goes on in that note to write of the “moment to moment delight” of watching Mr. Foreman’s work, and that’s where I must disagree. I know I’m supposed to like this play, supposed to appreciate Mr. Foreman’s bold genius, supposed to be awed and impressed by the nonsensical goings-on, and I’m aware that my lack of appreciation for them marks me only as a philistine. Still, I was entirely undelighted.

That’s not quite fair; I was only mostly undelighted. Mr. Foreman writes, designs and directs his shows, and the design, at least, was a sight: Enormous upstage Victorian-ish walls, covered with patterns and portraits and mirrors and gingerbread; small crystal chandeliers hanging over the stage and house; actors in stylized samurai-meets-Victorian outfits; all manner of unusual props, from imitation rowboats to bows and arrows to a fake duck, all itemized by a voice-of-God voice-over at the play’s start. And Willem Dafoe gives an intense, controlled performance as the titular Idiot—it is unclear what exactly he’s doing, of course, but he does it very well.

It’s all interesting, at least, if not precisely enjoyable—at least until, yet again, the bright floodlights over the stage go on, pointed into the audience’s eyes, while a recording plays sirens blaring and telephones ringing and an amplified woman’s piercing voice shouts “Watch out!” That’s when I decided I was envious of the man seated next to me, in a suit of leather: He was somehow sleeping through it.

editorial@observer.com

I lose patience with plays like this. I try not to. The prolific Ms. Rebeck—author of last season’s social satire The Scene, and the post-9/11 farce Ominium Gatherum, a Pulitzer Prize contender she co-wrote with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros—has now written, of all creaky things, a suspense drama. It’s a genre that theater has mostly abandoned to television (where Ms. Rebeck toiled for many years). But if I’m biased against the dated genre—not to mention the talent of the respected playwright herself—there’s one thing on which we can all surely agree: A suspense drama must have suspense.

Mauritius doesn’t have any. It has contrived dramatic tension; it has Serious Undertones (about sibling rivalry, damaged people); it has its moments. There’s a lot going for it: a top director, Doug Hughes of Doubt, and a first-rate cast that includes F. Murray Abraham as a reptilian con man. But I’m sorry, the play is ridiculous.

I surely won’t be alone in pointing out that the plot of Mauritius is a rip-off of David Mamet’s breakthrough American Buffalo (1975): In the Rebeck, three guys are involved in a con game for an invaluable stamp collection; in the Mamet, it’s three guys and an invaluable coin collection. The lowlife similarities are so instantly recognizable—including the pastiche of Mr. Mamet’s signature four-letter style—that it dawned on me that Ms. Rebeck’s new play could be a double bluff: the con game masquerading as homage.

Unless, that is, it’s a triple bluff. The playwright tries to throw us off the scent with her vulnerable heroine, Jackie, who’s strangely attracted to one of the losers who might be conning her; (see the vulnerable heroine strangely attracted to the con artist in Mr. Mamet’s House of Games). Throw in a Glengarry Glen Ross–style disquisition on how to sucker a mark, and Ms. Rebeck’s fulsome Mamet tribute is complete.

Would any of this matter if Mauritius had turned out to be a riveting mystery drama? We’ll never know. The bruised and confused Jackie (played by the talented Alison Pill) has inherited two priceless stamps from Mauritius—described as “the crown jewels of philately”—from her mom, who’s just died. But she doesn’t know their real value. Enter her wicked half-sister, Mary (played by the Tony Award-winning Katie Finneran, who’s wasted in a perilously underwritten role). Manipulative Mary knows crown jewels when she sees them, arguing loudly that she inherited them from her dad. The scenes between the sisters amount to a generalized domestic psychodrama of mutual loathing in which Ms. Rebeck intends the stamps to be some kind of metaphor for human relationships.

If you’ve been studying philately lately, you’ll know that certain stamps can increase in value even though they’re flawed—like people, Ms. Rebeck is saying. (And like plays? The more flawed the play, the better?)

The Mauritius mystery begins with Jackie going off to the office of a surly philatelist (the stalwart Dylan Baker) to get the stamps valued. There she meets Dennis, a young shady loser in a leather jacket (the Emmy Award-winning Bobby Cannavale) who knows a thing or two about stamps. Dennis is an accomplice of the killer-shark scam artist, Sterling (F. Murray Abraham), who now goes after the stamps for a bargain price from gullible Jackie. (The excellent Mr. Abraham, exuding evil intent, appears to be playing Barrabas, which he recently did for Theatre for a New Audience in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta.)

I have one word for Jackie: Google.

She could have saved herself a heap of trouble if she’d begun by Googling the price of the stamps, as I’ve just done. “The Island of Mauritius is famous for two of the rarest stamps in the world, the 1847 ‘Post Office’ Penny Orange and Twopence Blue.” In 1993 they were auctioned for over $2 million.

Do you realize what those two stamps would be worth today? “If she goes online, we’re fucked,” says Sterling. That goes for the play, too: The entire premise of Theresa Rebeck’s mystery drama would be fucked if the dramatist hadn’t withheld obvious information. Half the audience is yelling out silently to the naïve, waiflike Jackie: “Google stamps of Mauritius, for God’s sake, and save yourself from the wiles of F. Murray Abraham!”

But the playwright wants to string us along as best she can. Jackie goes online at last toward the end of act one—whereupon she resolves, à la Mamet, to con the con men.

A couple of smackdowns liven things up a bit—Jackie flattens big sis with a punch to the jaw, and we’re meant to feel glad. (We do.) Mr. Abraham’s frustrated Sterling beats up the newly manipulative Jackie, and we’re meant to feel shocked. (We don’t. Well, I didn’t.) In any case he apologizes sweetly, which makes everything okay.

I hope I’m not spoiling anything for you by adding that everyone in this cast of familiar characters double-crosses everyone else, and that nothing actually makes any sense you’d care a jot about. Mauritius, the ersatz David Mamet drama, ends up as a lame comedy caper, with happy ending attached.

HOWARD BARKER, LITTLE KNOWN YET highly acclaimed, is being given an ambitious showcase by an adventurous troupe that’s new to me. The Inner Circle Theatre Company’s New York premiere of his 1987 The Possibilities reminds us of the uncompromised possibilities of theater itself.

Mr. Barker is one of the post-Osborne generation of British playwrights that includes activists such as Edward Bond, David Edgar and Howard Brenton. Mr. Barker’s urgent polemical essays about theater damn the commercial bourgeois dramas of no surprises (and happy endings), while taking no prisoners in his opposition to the liberal pieties that merely comfort or preach to the choir. His fierce intelligence and talent aren’t without humor, but he doesn’t see life as a comedy. (Even Chekhov is too sentimental for him.)

Mr. Barker is a playwright who believes in the darker places of the soul, in moral speculation and ambiguity, in confronting the pain of being alive. In his stories and fables, he’s daring to reinvent the theater experience.

The 10 short plays in the The Possibilities evening at the Sargent Theatre on West 54th Street are outwardly naïve, timeless parables of war and deception and wounds. In a Middle Eastern war, a weaver ecstatically discovers that real blood dyes wool in a spectacular way—and is killed. A married woman is deceived into opening the door of her home to terrorists. A timorous emperor shits in his pants with fear, but flogs the loyal servant who sympathizes with him. A paranoid hobo is a bookseller convinced that all books will be burned. A torturer, new to town in search of confessions, not truth, rents a room. The biblical story of Judith turns into a tale of a woman’s unforeseen, obsessive love for her conquered enemy. A wounded soldier returns home with a sack of severed heads and seduces his wife.

Some of these stories, which have been ably directed by Albert Aeed, work better than others, and some among the committed, multicultural cast need a little more experience. No matter. The veteran actor Angus Hepburn gives a wonderful performance as the deranged bookseller, and we’ve been introduced to Mr. Barker’s compelling, self-described “Theater of Catastrophe.”

This remarkable evening of playlets prepares the way for the Epic Theatre Ensemble’s New York premiere later this month of Howard Barker’s 1992 A Hard Heart, starring Kathleen Chalfant.