James Bryant, who runs Subway's Beijing sandwich franchise from a grim office, describes how his Chinese joint-venture partner (now in jail) swindled the company out of $200,000.
The play's battlefield is a grim office in which Man (Dylan McDermott), a war veteran, and Woman (Portia), a military psychiatrist, face off in a series of short scenes.
Andy Blankenbuehler's choreography embodies the same sensibility, with jutting, strutting disco moves applied to everything, sometimes wittily and sometimes to sinister, robotic effect, suggesting a hybrid of "Saturday Night Fever" and the grim office melodrama "Machinal".
The general nature of the film is clear and similar in both: Spielberg has slathered the story – set largely in grim US CIA offices and even grimmer communist East Berlin – with "serious" steely greys and icy blues.
A grim Home Office report confirms that gang activity did indeed move off the streets.
They reveal themselves, like dragonflies, at the most unexpected moments: through the window of a grim government office, beyond the smoke curling from the debris left by a suicide bomber, above the demoralizing gridlock of traffic and poverty.
The winning architect, to be chosen at the end of the summer, will provide new buildings to house new entertainments, in the hope that a reborn pier will help the biggest town in Essex (population: 160,000) move towards a brightly cultured future, shifting the focus away from its grim 1960s office blocks, some of which house the headquarters of HM Revenue and Customs.
*** Five hours before the People's PPE meeting, I pitch up at a grim-looking office block next to Euston station, buzz the entry phone and go up a couple of flights of stairs into a warren of spartan rooms.
But the mood was a bit more grim inside the offices of the New York Racing Association.
Next door, a grim mirrored-glass office building, headquarters for New Jersey Transit and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, squatted atop a multistory garage.
