If "The Lobster" remains Lanthimos's most vital work, that's because it tempers the gloom with a mischievous play of wit.
The movie is literally a head trip, but without the druggy and mystical overtones that would have clogged the free play of wit a quarter century ago.
Athena (the delightful, extraordinarily agile Mariann Mayberry) drives the plot, and that tells you this is not a standard narration but a real dramatization, an actual play of wit and resonance.
And there are performances of heft and authority in both: Jared Angle's calm ownership of the Sanguinic variation anchors "Temperaments," while the sensual play of wits between Wendy Whelan and Philip Neal, and their nuanced attention to the crystalline Gluck score, illuminate their central duet in "Chaconne".
But, while this is a play of sharp wit and visceral power, it also strikes me as contradictory in its attitudes.
The question that Ergüven puts, in the context of modern Turkey, is one that Jane Austen might have recognized: How, as a young woman, can you preserve not just your modesty but also your freedom of spirit and the play of your wits, when the purpose of your being, as laid down in social laws, resides in the finding of a man?
Yves Abel, the founder of the Opéra Français de New York, draws playing of Gallic wit and charm from the City of Birmingham Orchestra.
In a good conversation, talking and listening, expressing and absorbing are one and the same, all part of the play of intelligence and wit and human sympathy that generates fresh perceptions and calls forth good stories.
The performances are strong enough to move the tragicomic plot along at a steady clip and put across much of the play's wit and most of its heart.
Manhattan Theater Club announced on Wednesday that Cynthia Nixon, who won an Emmy as the uptight lawyer Miranda Hobbes on the HBO series, will play Professor Vivian Bearing in the first Broadway production of "Wit," Margaret Edson's play about cancer and poetry that was an Off Broadway hit in the late 1990s and won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
I was in the room, and the comment played like fun sparring - the analyst was trying to get a rise from Dimon, and Dimon was showing that he was willing to play the game of wits.
