There are a lot of good things to say about the premiere of local playwright Sonya Schneider's Big Rock, which runs at West of Lenin through March 31.

The technical team shines, especially scenic designer Julia Hayes Welch and lighting designer Jessica Trundy. They conspire to transport the audience from the Fremont theater to the front lawn of a hideaway cabin on one of the San Juan Islands, with wind-swept coastal prairie grasses, driftwood fences, squat shrubbery, the titular slab of granite, and an atmosphere suffused with blue-silver and gold-blue light.

Evan Whitfield, an actor who does an excellent job portraying complicated nice guys, plays Hamish, an upbeat islander with a heart of gold and an empty soul. His desire to write poetry drives him to become the personal assistant of Harris Sands (Todd Jefferson Moore), a washed-up poet who's recently bought a small house "two hours from nowhere" to write his next big book of poems, if he can. The action begins in earnest when Harris's successful artist daughter, Signe (Meg McLynn), arrives on the island for an extended visit after skipping the opening of her latest art show in New York City.

Pretty quickly we learn a couple things. There's unresolved tension between father and daughter due to circumstances surrounding the death of the mother, and this tension is negatively affecting the creative lives of both characters. Meanwhile, Hamish—the name is "Scottish for James," he says at one point—believes he needs to adopt some pluck and egotism from these self-obsessed artists if he's ever going to enter the world of serious poem-making and also earn Signe's favor.

The audience laughed at several barbed exchanges between father and daughter, which Moore and McLynn delivered with that wide-eyed plus cocked-head expression that lets you know you're supposed to laugh, which always seems a little forced to me. But in general, Moore plays his role with the right mix of aloofness and wisdom, and McLynn does a good job finding her character's warmth and generosity as well as her harder edges.

It was hard to focus on all this goodness, though, or at least hard for me, due to the play's tired characterization of poets and artists as tortured yet winged souls with a dependency on booze. (It may be true that writers disproportionately suffer from depression, anxiety, and alcoholism—but that's not because they're particularly sensitive creatures. It's because there are no jobs.)

There are a few choices playwright Schneider leans on hard in this play that work together to create this effect, and I just wish we'd all agree, as a people, to retire them from the dramatic arts, at least for a period of 10 years or so.

Thing 1: Taking large gulps of whiskey before saying something intense. I know the characters need a bit of business reflecting their emotional state during long periods of dialogue, but dramatically downing three fingers of bourbon before speaking the truth is so clichéd, it's comical. (And when done for comedic effect, it falls flat.) Almost anything else would be more interesting.

The cure for this particular problem is contained within the play itself. One of the first things Harris says, for instance, is amazingly weird and specific: He openly wonders how his life would have changed if he remembered his mother licking him like a puppy fresh from the womb. But after saying that, he just turns into a pretty classic drunk poet/bad father figure who occasionally makes bold claims about the nature of the poetic soul. Lean into the strangeness, writers of the world!

Thing 2: Portraits of poets as insomniac shut-ins in search of inspiration. There are as many different types of poets (and painters, and sculptors, and multimedia-whatevers) as there are types of people in this world. But for some reason, plays and films are lousy with depictions of poets as misty-bardic drunks driven only by the passion to find their next "muse."

This depiction perpetuates a common misunderstanding about poets. The beauty of a tree or the pain of a breakup moves a poet as much as it does, say, a banker. But because poets study language and its operations very closely, they have more tools to make a walk in the woods sound much cooler (arguably) than a typical banker could. The thing that separates poets from other people—and even other writers—is the poet's absurd attention to language and also the poet's habit of reading lots of poetry. It's not some special inner fire fueled by booze and anxiety, and not some god-given sensitivity to the shininess of stars or whatever. Everyone automatically likes the shininess of stars without the special encouragement of poets.

The playwright does make it clear that anxiety and booze aren’t particularly productive for the creative process, and that ultimately luck and inspiration come when you’re looking for it in the right places, but the clichéd characterizations I mention overshadow that point.

Tangent: I don't expect everyone to have seen I Heart Huckabees. But if you're writing a play involving a poet and a rock, you must know this scene exists:

Thing 3: Sobbing that immediately turns into vengeful laughter. No more of this, please, playwrights and screenwriters, unless the character lives in a secret lair underneath a volcano. To be fair, this only happens once in the play, but it was so melodramatic, I couldn't handle it.

Anyway, even if you dismiss the above as a list of my pet peeves—which you are welcome to do, because they absolutely are—I'll just add this: Rendering artists and poets as cartoon alcoholics and/or mystic geniuses is not only tiresome, but it goes some way in justifying the nonartist's dismissal of the pursuit of the creative life. The truth about the day-to-day course of that life is much more boring (but also much more fulfilling) than some endless search for inspiration. Being good at poetry or visual art is like being good at anything else: It requires practice, patience, colleagues who will be honest with you, pure nepotism, and lots of luck. That doesn't sound like a particularly fun play to watch, but neither is the one full of bromides about Art.

Big Rock plays at West of Lenin through March 31.