But Mr. Shropshire — an American who directs this company from Groningen, the Netherlands — and his collaborators manage a deadly combination of dogged repetition, earnest self-importance and obliqueness that almost immediately dulls any interest to be found in the dance.
His Chekov was a more comic role, his relative youth and vulnerability being ratcheted up, saucer-eyed with earnest self-importance as he relayed vital information to Kirk or Spock on the bridge.
And the serious critics were so earnest, finding lasting importance, for example, in Stanley Kramer's On the Beach because of its bittersweet warning of a world killed by nuclear poison and inhabited only by dying lovers whistling "Waltzing Matilda".
Busily monitoring our well-known tendency to strident self-importance, earnest American practitioners of personal diplomacy can risk missing the genuinely humbling lesson of being abroad: an awareness of how bewildering another country's own blend of boorishness and fervent belief, of openness and defiance, of backwardness and progress and of internal dissensions can be.
Then she delivered an earnest speech about the importance of the arts.
Bush's earnest answer about the importance of free trade and strong relations with Canadians became fodder for mockery.
The sequel to "Ridin' " is "The Bill Collecta," another Krayzie Bone collaboration, a surprisingly earnest track about the importance of timely bill payment.
On a recent Thursday afternoon, in the Broadway ballroom on the sixth floor of the Marriott Marquis, a group of about 750 people sat at round tables listening to earnest testimonials of the importance of hugs, listening and pee-wee football game attendance at the National Father's Day Council's Father of the Year Awards.
Here in the tony Boston suburbs, I hear much earnest talk about "the importance of giving back".
