Writers write. It’s something they are driven to do, for good or bad and the Internet has given them an excessive amount of opportunities to get their work out into the wilderness of cyberspace. Writer Theresa Rebeck gives you every reason to hate the four writing students who had paid $5000 each to have a private in-home “Seminar” with a once famous writer.

First we have the meeting in an impossibly large eight-room Manhattan apartment of Kate (Aya Cash). Kate’s the uptight one with minimal backbone who’s been re-writing the same story for six years based on the faint praise she’s received from many previous seminars, workshops and classes.

Her friend is the impoverished Martin (Greg Keller) who has spent all the money he has to join this seminar foursome. He bristles at the studied intellectual pomposity of Douglas (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe) but Martin can no longer pay for rent and convinces Kate to allow him to stay in her grand pad. You wonder with so little spine why the apartment (we only see the living room) isn’t practically a commune for the artistic types and con artists of New York.

Douglas is one of those impossibly smug writers who you imagine aspires  to be published in “The New Yorker” and will be much beloved by erudite critics, but likely unloved by the common man.

Izzy (Jennifer Ikeda) is the woman who is bares her breasts to get the attention of all the men and will in time take them as her conquests. Is she a whore or the next Jack Kerouac? Only her future tell-all will tell us.

They have all come together for this writing seminar with Leonard (Jeff Goldblum) who knew early success as a writer, but failed to live up to his  promise. After accusations of plagiarism, he settled into an editing job. Yet his bitterness comes out in his hesitating intellectual attack on his students. The two most productive students, Kate and Douglas are given off-hand unpleasant assessments.  Kate is the spoiled princess too enamored with Jane Austin and cursed with little talent. Douglas has talent that he whores.

The only praise Leonard has is for the sexually available Izzy who barely produces two pages about sex. That’s her come-on line or lines. Soon enough she and Leonard are sleeping together. Izzy has time to sleep with Martin as well.

Director Sam Gold doesn’t give us details that would make any of these characters more loving. The laughs are empty and for Los Angeles and even the Ahmanson, the breast baring isn’t particularly shocking. That bit of tit isn’t enough to titillate the audience, but should keep you from bringing your small kids.

I understand that Alan Rickman played Leonard on Broadway. You can only imagine his rich voice relishing the bitter anger in the lines. Goldblum’s Leonard is a different creature, the gentler, slightly absent-minded, off-center intellectual characterization that Goldblum seems to specialize in. You can imagine either as a real writing teacher. Certainly, Rickman’s villain would be more viscerally frightening even if you haven’t seen him in Harry Potter.

Women writers might be offended by the portrayal of women here, particularly as the end finds two men bolstering each other’s courage and praising each other’s ability to write. That’s when the real seminar begins. Yet with no character to love and the distinctly New York characterizations, the smart writing of Rebeck is mostly wasted. If you like New York types or at least sneering at them, this play is for you. If you’ve been to one too many writing seminar or taught one too many seminar, you might recognize these people as the types you’ve brushed shoulders with and avoided. If you’re still working on the same story after six years of faint praise and gentle criticism, this might be a wake up call unless it would make you late for your own three hundredth writing seminar or you’re saving your money for writing seminar 301.

“Seminar” continues until Nov. 18 at the Ahmanson, 135 N. Grand Ave, in Downtown LA. For more information visit their website.