Stymied by poetry and frustrated by the ephemeral nature of theatre, Dunham focused her narrative efforts on script writing.
The jokes seem forced and there is too much of an effort to sentimentalize the relationship between Bart and Lisa, causing the show to lose its narrative drive".
We become merciful, she wrote, when we behave as the "concerned reader of a novel," understanding each person's life as a "complex narrative of human effort in a world full of obstacles".
Sure enough, the text fails to coalesce into a compelling narrative despite considerable effort by the British director Robert Shaw and his three performers to chisel out specific personalities (Francis Benhamou's battle-scarred benevolence, Angela Church's wry melancholy, Kina Bermudez's peevish grief).
We heard about her life narrative in an effort to humanize her.
But veterans and peace activists have countered this false narrative in an effort to provide full disclosure about the war.
And banking on cures, racing for cures, and turning everyone with a tumor into a conquering hero is the wrong narrative for that effort.
The narrative chronicles the efforts of an eclectic group of locals — among them a trombone player, a chef, a civil rights lawyer, a disc jockey and a displaced Mardi Gras chief — as they struggle to repair their lives after the storm.
Or, as the historian Albert Cowdrey expresses it in the introduction to "Land's End," the Corps' official narrative of its efforts in southern Louisiana, "Society required artifice to survive in a region where nature might reasonably have asked a few more eons to finish a work of creation that was incomplete".
This pamphlet narrative follows the efforts of Alex Prokop (Mr. Kupsc again), an investigative journalist for a lefty magazine about to "go corporate," and Paul Cooper Joseph Culpp), a 9/11 obsessive whose daughter died in the attack, to unearth the truth in the face of suppressed information, disturbing ambiguities and, when needling the powers that be, their own amateurism.
