"Twelve years a slave," Linklater murmured as the cast trooped backstage along with the producers.
A more unconventional episode took place two years after Hurricane Katrina, when the cast trooped down to Biloxi, Miss., to highlight the plight of residents whose homes still hadn't been rebuilt.
And even as the familiar cast is trooping on stage – Cicero the wordsmith, Catiline the conspirator, Crassus the tycoon, Cato the conservative – it is hard to resist the suspicion that we have been here many times before.
You both feel for and admire the troops cast into this pit of ambiguity.
The mujahideen could not have known that more than 30 years later, Afghanistan would still be at war, though one involving a different cast of foreign troops.
Nick Clegg always suggests a naive member of the officer class, with his troops cast as Tommies sleepwalking into a hail of enemy fire.
The troops cast a wide net and then sort through the catch, with much of the investigation coming after the arrest, not before.
The Tempest is explicitly concerned with its own nature as a play, frequently drawing links between Prospero's art and theatrical illusion; the shipwreck was a spectacle that Ariel performed, while Antonio and Sebastian are cast in a troop to act.
Other Democrats, either looking ahead to a possible presidential candidacy or their own re-elections, have also distanced themselves from such a proposal, fearful of being cast as opposing the troops.
In one of those company-wide retrenchment or downsizing conference calls that are like the cruel ceremonies that accompany the defeat of nations, Armstrong, as he admonished his troops and cast great blame on the waters, was distracted by someone with a camera.
