Since its brief original Broadway run in 1981, "Merrily" had been consigned to that limbo of beautiful, broken theater pieces that could never be put right.
Which, of course, also means that anyone who might champion the cause of "readability" is consigned to that worst of all possible categories of indiscriminating reader, the pre-adolescent teenage girl.
And yet it goes on being largely undiscovered in its own country, passed around and praised only among a bookish cognoscenti, and its author, John Williams, consigned to that unenviable category inhabited by such august company as Richard Yates and James Salter: the writer's writer.
Looking back over the last decade, I can only wonder that shows as vibrant as Christopher Durang's "Betty's Summer Vacation," Diana Son's "Stop Kiss" and, from the past winter, the exquisite revival of Michael John LaChiusa's "First Lady Suite" all had such fleeting existences before being consigned to that limbo where good plays go until enough time has passed to make them officially revivable.
And when everyone else is speaking, you had better do it often and do it well, or risk being drowned in the din, consigned to that house at the edge of the village, where few people visit and, when they do, expect to hear little of any consequence.
Hoping they are not consigned to that category are executives for the Clairol Herbal Essences products, sold by Procter & Gamble, and the Old Navy division of Gap, the two new sponsors for "American Idol" whose product placements will not be as omnipresent as those for AT&T Wireless, Coca-Cola and Ford.
It needs to be consigned to that trash heap of history, along with many of those other cultural traditions noted above that are mainly about female subjugation.
With the State Department on high alert for security threats, especially since the Sept. 11 attacks, and many American diplomats consigned to embassies that resemble fortresses and armored motorcades that do not make unscheduled stops, Mr. Stevens plunged into Arab social life.
"Too many children with disabilities are unnecessarily prevented from going to school, while others are consigned to environments that discourage real learning - environments that are unhealthy, unsafe, ineffective, and unfriendly," the UNICEF Representative added.
Robert Merivel, the protagonist and narrator of Rose Tremain's Restoration, is much concerned with the effort to forget things – to consign them to "that part of my brain" filled "with utter darkness … into which so much of what I have once known is carefully crammed".
As he consigns himself to that very past, perhaps the sly, silent smile of his extended leave-taking is his parting gift.
