"The Designated Mourner," Mr. Weber said, "is so theatrically indulgent that it dares you to find it pretentious, or maybe just precious.
At midnight, she went home, missing maybe 15 precious minutes of coverage, enough time for Florida to change hands another half-dozen times.
Last week, our financial Superman, the mild-mannered Midwesterner Warren E. Buffett, swooped in again to save another bank, the financial markets, the American economy and just maybe our precious way of life.
Maybe the precious few who predicted something close to Jeremy Lin's meteoric rise are the same few who could have predicted that the Knicks' seven-game winning streak — a thrilling run that made the term Linsanity a global brand — would come crashing down Friday night in an 89-85 loss to the New Orleans Hornets at Madison Square Garden.
Andre Gregory's production of "The Designated Mourner," the Wallace Shawn play that is receiving its New York premiere in a long-abandoned men's club in Lower Manhattan, is so theatrically indulgent that it dares you to find it pretentious, or maybe just precious.
So there aren't a lot of things like gold here; maybe some other precious metals, but I'm not sure any fit the bill.
At one point in my laboriously worked-out string quartet, I directed the violist to apply a mute to play just two notes; Mr. Beeson discreetly suggested that such a tiny detail was precious, maybe even irrelevant and just a little silly.
Maybe it's precious to me especially because of its relative asceticism.
Yes, Taymor's exquisite plates -- hay-roasted potatoes, goat's milk and sorrel; Carpenter's pigeon with yeast and fermented cherry; seaweed and tofu beignets -- are a little precious, maybe a little expensive, for where they are.
