The opening scenes, which set out the complicated premise, are swift and efficient: short sentences, brisk transitions, quick bursts of functional dialogue.
The linguistic pedantry of the play's central character is, however, surely autobiographical: when Henry complains that he can't bear to see a page in one of his plays consisting of purely functional dialogue, it feels like his creator worrying about the transition from plays of the head to plays with more heart.
The approach detects usability problems in several levels of software design (like functional design, dialogue design and presentation design) and several domains (like user authorisation, software configuration, application flow, user instruction and hardware).
Fiction has developed in unexpected ways since Elizabeth Bowen commanded, in her "Notes on Writing a Novel," that the "functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the novelist's mind.
Some of this feels more shaped than organic: the conduit for Gary's self-improvement is a baldly functional character whose dialogue works too hard at being punchy; and Renee's softening seems too tidy.
"By working together to tackle the erosion of the Fourth Amendment presented by bulk data collection," Kellegrew said, "people from across partisan divides are resurrecting the lost art of collaboration and in the process, rehabilitating the possibility of a functional American political dialogue denied to the people by dysfunction majority partisan hackery".
It would mainly consist of self-contained scenes, done from one angle, in one continuous take, with no informational dialogue, no functional shots, no plot devices or any of the usual tricks cinema uses to suggest or elicit emotion.
Where functional usefulness cannot be established, dialogue must be left out".
That the dialogue is merely functional is not a cosmetic flaw.
Not only does she reduce most of the characters' dialogue to the functional, pushing it in the direction of verbalizing specific plot points in need of resolution rather than catching Brady, his friends, and his family just talking about their lives and dreams, about the world they live in.
Indeed, our experience is that after having built the proper functional representation for a technology, the dialogue between the two parties becomes much more concrete, fluid and creative.
