Like the more earnest characters in Star Wars, the leaders of minor parties who are angling for a pact always promise to bring balance to the Force.
Mr. Smits is best known for playing earnest characters like Bobby Simone on "NYPD Blue" and Matt Santos, a victorious presidential contender modeled after a young Illinois politician named Barack Obama, on "The West Wing".
"I love playing earnest characters, and I love characters who are super-boring but don't realise it," he says (his appearance in The Office: An American Workplace as the deeply dull Deangelo Vickers is an example of the latter type).
Whether the tweedy, earnest characters played by Ms. Martin and Mr. Abatemarco are teaching their children how to refer to genitals in the appropriate, open manner at the dinner table or are forcing them to express their most intimate emotions using a pie chart (Eli always points to the section marked embarrassment), they are monsters of an amusing and particularly modern stripe.
And Thomas, with the filmmakers' help, makes Elliott's earnest, melancholy character vibrant and unpredictable.
Lately, enough small boutiques and restaurants have popped up for the area to have an earnest, artsy character.
Beside her, playing piano was Todd Almond, who wrote the impressionistic, nearly dialogue-free production and plays the earnest title character; Love is Athena, the choir boy's ambitious girlfriend who leaves the Midwest to pursue her dreams as a singer in New York.
The forest is rather crowded, because it also contains the wrongly banished Duke (Rosalind's father, also Braugher), the wronged Orlando (David Furr of The Importance Of Being Earnest, whose character fell in love with Rosalind moments before he had to flee for his life) and various other star-crossed lovers.
Yet John Cariani's "Almost, Maine," an earnest 19-character play about the romantic happenings one cold night in northern Maine, has since been produced around the world, including in Australia, Dubai and South Korea.
Like smart, confident teens trying out new belief systems in earnest, her characters make assured, funny observations about their peers, and then, lightly, move on. .
