With two more high-profile plays opening in New York this season — and a huge movie deal in the works — Theresa Rebeck’s time may have come.

Theresa Rebeck’s new play, “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” just opened in New York — her fourth play to be staged on Broadway and her 30th in total. When asked the secret to her prolific writing career, Rebeck explains: “A lot of writers have this neurosis around finishing things, ‘the terror of finishing.’ I have the opposite thing: the terror of the unfinished. And so once I get to a certain place in a script my anxiety goes really high until I write the end.”

The scene is a restaurant kitchen in a fashionable Brooklyn neighborhood. And it is true to form in all its detail, from the sleek, stainless-steel appliances to the oversize prep area suitable for a chef with an oversize ego to match.

But no diners will be coming to this restaurant because it is exists only on stage—specifically, the production of playwright Theresa Rebeck’s comedy “Seared,” which opened this week at Massachusetts’ Williamstown Theatre Festival. The show, which stars Hoon Lee, a Broadway veteran who also...

Acclaimed playwright Theresa Rebeck joins us to discuss her fourth play, “Bernhardt/Hamlet,” which opened September 25 at the American Airlines Theater, starring Janet McTeer in both title roles.

If you want to find Theresa Rebeck, she is in Brooklyn, writing. That explains her prodigious output: She has written or co-written more than 20 plays (“Omnium Gatherum,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; “Mauritius”; “The Understudy”), scripted cop shows on television, turned out a couple of novels and created the NBC show “Smash,” set in the world of Broadway.

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