In "The L Word," underneath the libidinous drumbeat (though I'm not complaining) is the interesting, subtler thrum of what Freud called "ordinary unhappiness".
Hitler rose to power because he exploited in Germans that sense of what Speer called "personal unhappiness caused by the breakdown of the economy," which "was replaced by a frenzy that demanded victims".
The world of young adult literature is rife with shallow troubles and what the singer Ben Folds calls "unearned unhappiness".
But whatever you choose to call the unhappiness that runs like a flu epidemic through the play, it produces a gamut of symptoms.
When Yeats told her he wasn't happy without her, she replied: "Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness, and are happy in that.
He shared with Thompson that night a no win/no lose formulation which left room for doing his work but not any for family life or what Freud called normal human unhappiness.
She called Scully's unhappiness with her situation "understandable" and positively critiqued Gillian Anderson, calling her performance "wonderful".
The lavish world of the musical denies emptiness and loss, but as a child growing up in Flatbush, Allen, who was born Allan Konigsberg, was visited early by what he once called "the bluebird of unhappiness".
He and Danny, who was almost nine years older, grew up in the vortex of their parents' stormy marriage in a two-bedroom apartment on 185th Street in Upper Manhattan — "the squalid world of [my] unhappiness," as he called it.
"The Cherry Orchard" is, like "The Seagull," one of those plays about unhappiness that Chekhov called a comedy, which has kept directors and academics pondering furiously for the past century.
