But, he said, "as they progressed, they could play pretty thorny defense".
These are musicians for whom sharp-edged themes, complex rhythms and dense harmonies hold no terrors, and they usually make the works they play, however thorny, sound fresh and vital.
And Mr. Daniels and Ms. Mortimer are fully equipped to play the thorny, torturous, old-Hollywood-style relationship between Will and Mac, one that Mr. Sorkin has explicitly associated with the great screwball newspaper comedy "His Girl Friday" (with the genders more or less reversed).
"Disgraced," which opened on Monday night at Lincoln Center's Claire Tow Theater in a sleek production directed by Kimberly Senior, is a continuously engaging, vitally engaged play about thorny questions of identity and religion in the contemporary world, with an accent on the incendiary topic of how radical Islam and the terrorism it inspires have affected the public discourse.
Some, like those gathered here, are still prepared to play this thorny stuff live: in this current lineup, Denny "Feelers Rebo" Walley (guitar, 1976) plays alongside Mark Rockette Mortonn" Boston, who played bass in the definitive 1968-1974 Magic Band, while John Drumboo" French inhabits the Captain's poetic mania at the mic.
More specifically he said, it is a play "about thorny questions of identity and religion in the contemporary world, with an accent on the incendiary topic of how radical Islam and the terrorism it inspires have affected the public discourse".
Cast in the CBS hit "Chicago Hope" in 1994, he won a best actor Emmy for playing the thorny Dr. Jeffrey Geiger.
In the past several weeks, the Los Angeles Philharmonic presented two all-Stravinsky programs at Lincoln Center, the Eos Orchestra put on an evening of Stravinsky chamber theatre, and the London Sinfonietta played the thorny late works at Carnegie Hall.
It loses all four games of a four-game series to the team closest to it in its division, then when it could be on the brink of collapse, improbably sweeps three games in its next series, playing its thorniest rival in that team's home park, where only bad things seem to happen.
The heroine of Shakespeare's thorny play is a convent novitiate, the rigidly principled Isabella, dressed in austere bridal white.
