To the Editor of New Yorker magazine:
In his review of "Seminar" John Lahr, your drama critic, comes very close to playing the role of Leonard, a character he describes as preposterous in a play he calls claptrap. The review pays a backhanded compliment to the play by calling a commercial success, sure to please those who have never experienced the reality of a workshop situation or working with editors and don't know that the play depends on gross exaggerations and unrealistically scathing critical comments meted out to hapless students of fine writing. But isn't this exactly how art works? By dramatic compression and exaggeration -- even hyperbole - to bring the most salient points of reality into sharp focus? Leonard's arrogance is central to the play, but the reaction of his targets, the aspiring writer-clients plays an even more important part in creating dramatic tension; the dramatization of their intense reaction requires Leonard's behavior to be outrageously exaggerated. I've recently translated a novel, and now the author is embroiled in battles with professional readers and editors whose pronouncements may be a little softer than Leonard's, but the message is the same. And so is the author's reaction that threatens to wreck my Skype when he pours out his bitterness to me. Trying to maintain my neutrality is increasingly difficult, because it is I who gets stuck with the required rewrites. The same book has been translated into two other languages, accepted and published without the change of an iota. Perhaps Leonard, is an unique product of the English-speaking literary world.
Paul Sohar
