This is rhetoric that goes beyond character assassination and rightwing posturing into something darker and more dangerous.
But directors who present these sorts of performances with authority offer images, gestures, and symbols that go beyond character to unfold, as if in a first-person directorial monologue, the depths and shadow zones unaddressed in action and performance.
But there are elements whose beauty goes beyond character or story: the multifocal nature of the dance passages, the marvelous articulation of fingers and eyes, the fluent overlap of gesture and dance rhythm, the mobility of the spine.
"I don't like people who lie to me," said the historian John Morton Blum, who was one of Mr. Bush's professors at Yale. "But beyond character, there's the matter of adaptability.
Once she gives us her dramatis personae, the action around Alik's deathbed does not advance much beyond character sketches, a few acidly humorous scenes and the unexplained phenomenon that everybody around Alik gets a little better because he is there.
Beyond character witnesses, Stern could tick off a long record of social achievements, beginning with pro bono work as a young lawyer in a groundbreaking lawsuit that attacked the practice of racial steering in suburban New Jersey in the mid-1970s.
