Onstage the 10 dancers in gray are involved in a pilgrim's progress, however painful: a man propels himself forward on his stomach, a woman steps hesitantly, feet apart.
A bully – "I decide who stays in my squad" – who is also desperate for human connection (the scenes with Rachel when he scrabbled to make some sort of contact were painful), a man who is both impervious to the law and capable of keeping a remarkably cool head ("Easy to say from behind a desk, sir").
"A woman is taught that sex is so painful a man's penis will hurt her," my aesthetician told me in her shop in the back of a small mall in Heliopolis, a wealthy suburban neighborhood in Cairo.
Manning agrees to act as his translator and is soon interpreting between Proctor-Gould and his Russian girlfriend Raya, which is painful because Manning desperately fancies her himself.
It is painful, the men said, to walk out of the prison after an execution and have protesters call them murderers.
Part of the reason couples therapy can be so painful for men is that often times, the most painful thing in the world for a woman is different from the most painful thing in the world for a man.
My father still considers the death of Jim Reeves a painful global tragedy a man he never knew, from a country he never visited, a man who looked to me from his album sleeve like someone who ate only butter and milk for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
But he did take a tumble that, in some ways, may have been more painful for a man trying to win this race: he plummeted in the overall standings.
Reading this account of youthful adventures is both fascinating and painful for a man so immersed in his own experience, and it forces him to focus on possible endings to his story.
"I've worked under the most painful conditions any man has ever felt in his life," he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014.
