'Seminar' fanciful, but don't write it off

There are two bold and highly improbable things about "Seminar." First, the serious comedy by Theresa Rebeck is the rare new American play to arrive on star-driven Broadway with no bigger name than the splendid, but hardly mass-marketable, Alan Rickman and without the cushion of prior success in London or the nonprofit theaters.

This is healthy, even inspirational. Equally bold, but more distressingly improbable, is the play itself -- a slim, 100-minute pseudo-serious piece about the twists and turns of nasty creative mentoring.

The cast -- with Rickman as teacher and four gifted young actors as students in a private fiction workshop -- is breezy and bright. Everyone finds nonstop nuance and sexual charge in director Sam Gold's fast-talking, good-looking production. It works best, alas, if we don't notice how little of this power play adds up.

Still, what a pleasure to observe Rickman as he creates another variation on the seductions of malice. Long before his Severus Snape evolved from Harry Potter's professor of Potions to teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts, Rickman has been a sardonic master of magisterial theatrical magic and thin-skinned vulnerability.

Here he wears the rumpled persona of a tyrannical star novelist, a bully who brags about his knowledge of world suffering but who, we are meant to believe, can identify good and bad writing by glancing at a first paragraph.

We're also expected to believe that these four would-be authors would pay him $5,000 apiece for 10 weekly sessions, without anyone having an outside job. The appealing Lily Rabe plays a rich, nerdy beauty who seems far too smart to have spent the past six years rewriting the same short story. It is also hard to believe that she lives alone -- without threat these days from the city's rent guidelines board -- in her family's Upper West Side rent-controlled palace.

Hamish Linklater is endearingly intense as a secretive young writer. Hettienne Park makes an edgy sexpot who, for some reason, thinks fame would mean being in New York magazine, while Jerry O'Connell deftly juggles the glib vanity of the most experienced student.

Rebeck, the prolific playwright with major credits in quality TV drama, is also the creator of "Smash," NBC's hotly-anticipated -- at least among us theater geeks -- backstage series about a Broadway musical. In "Seminar," she can make these ambitious characters enjoyable, but can't make them matter.

WHAT "Seminar"

WHERE Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St.

INFO $51.50-$126.50; 212-239-6200; telecharge.com

BOTTOM LINE Slim and improbable play, enjoyable acting