His plays shine with a finely worked surface, beneath which there is often a torrent of confused emotion.
He was smoothing out the surface beneath him, perhaps searching for solid ground during an adjustment period in his career with the Mets.
What can be done, though, when the surface beneath a sidewalk slab settles or is washed out, leaving one slab considerably lower than its neighbor?
After using machines and hand tools to carve deeper into the pipe, finding a smooth surface beneath the gouges, crews will probably cover the pipe in salt.
But the action will be gritty, as well, for the dancers will have an ever-shifting gravel surface beneath their feet.
Shrub roots contribute to this process by retrieving nutrients from the deep soil and depositing them in litter on the soil surface beneath the shrub canopy.
And as always there is the sense that Russian civilization is but a fragile surface beneath which brew shadowy and ineluctable forces of history, ready to erupt at any moment and bring with them chaos.
The bar is a glass-topped rock garden and underneath its surface — beneath the ginger kamikazes and sojutinis — moss grows among smooth black stones and collages that look like Dadaist beer mats.
This tension tightens further in "Log on Studio Floor," in which the mottled surface of a rough gray chunk of wood all but blends with the paint-splattered wood surface beneath it; everything is reduced to paint on canvas.
In one paragraph he chooses the haughty voice of a film school professor: With "Chinatown," he says, the "replacement of social context by fictional construct creates a shimmer, a stylish and seductive surface beneath which run depths never spoken of".
But as technicians were preparing to repair the leak on Tuesday, they accidentally pushed a platform against the shuttle's robotic arm, ripping its insulation and scraping the surface beneath.
