Word: adroit
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...example of a self-organizing system that teeter-totters on the knife edge between order and chaos, "a grand compromise between structure and surprise." Too much order makes change impossible; too much chaos and there can be no continuity. But since balancing acts are necessarily precarious, even the most adroit tightrope walkers sometimes make one move too many. Mass extinctions, chaos theory suggests, do not require comets or volcanoes to trigger them. They arise naturally from the intrinsic instability of the evolving system, and superior fitness provides no safety...
...reformers who know next to nothing about American culture but want to get tough on it. They have no idea that there is a vast, complex and valuable tract of images between Norman Rockwell's Thanksgiving turkey and Andres Serrano's photo of a crucifix in urine. Years of adroit propaganda by the religious right have convinced many of them that a vote for preserving the nea in any form is a vote for sodomy, blasphemy and child abuse. This has become a matter of indurated faith, resistant to any insert of mere fact...
...this may sound unpromisingly clinical, but Lapine -- in this revision of a play originally staged in 1981 -- does an adroit job of interweaving day-event and night-revelation. The dream sequences (which include a dance into hell) are spookily compelling and splendidly differentiated. The play has the true fierceness of dream logic -- the sense that you are watching events unfold that are both unpredictable and ineluctable. A team of five musicians pilots us from one realm to the other, artfully building toward songs that never emerge. (Lapine knows all about linking action to music; he wrote the books for such...
...perversely, it's more reassuring to believe that a confederation of fbi and cia agents, mafiosi, Cubans and Kennedy's autopsy doctors hatched a plot remarkable both for its reach and for the fact that in more than three decades not a single participant has sung. Who were these adroit conspirators? The same men who two years earlier launched the quixotic, inept Bay of Pigs operation, and some of whom, it has been alleged, went on to bollix up the Watergate break...
...three plays, what's good is quite good, and what isn't is at least adroit and intelligent. And if you leave the theater with conflicted emotions, that's only to be expected. Mixed feelings are, after all, what Death Defying Acts aspires to: troubled laughter...