Still, the two actors are so committed, and Giovanna Sardelli's direction so taut, that the drama retains its harrowing emotional truth.
Chris Ofili's drawings, among the best I've ever seen by him, are so taut that they almost seem punched in tin.
And yet the effects of his incarceration were visible: the skin on his face was so taut that his cheekbones cast a skeletal shadow under his eyes; there was a noticeable swelling around his mouth.
Others stormed their way into the city, shooting indiscriminately.Inside the cavernous building "nerves were so taut that there were numerous accidental discharges, bullets flying through the ceiling of the hall", Ms Lim writes.
The straps are so taut that the cars barely budge — a good thing, because if even one car comes loose and ricochets around a deck, it can cause millions of dollars in damage.
Gerhard Richter has nothing on Jack Whitten's atmospheric yet completely tactile layers of paint, blurred by horizontal pulls so taut that the surface periodically splits, like wounds, revealing rich deposits of contrasting colors underneath.
Wal-Mart's supply chain, for example, is now stretched so taut that one small snafu avian flu in China, a computer virus in Bentonville or a dockers' strike in Los Angeles could one day just cause the whole thing to snap.
His neck, so taut that it resembled a system of ropes and pulleys, had an imprinted circle on its right side, as though he'd swallowed a key ring — the result of surgery, ten years ago, to remove a softball-size cancerous growth.
His face was marked with the traditional scarification of the Boudouma — a deep cut down the center of the nose, and diagonal marks on each cheek — and his skin was so taut that you could see his jaw muscles move when he spoke.
The sealskin-like water-repellent fabric, whose surface drag has been tested in NASA wind tunnels, is so taut that I suggest you have on hand a third assistant who knows C.P.R. Speedo, a British company, is one of the world's largest swimwear-makers, and its 2008 LZR Racer is the fastest suit ever, worn in the Beijing Olympics by more than ninety per cent of the gold medallists.
Take a normal head of hair and divide it into distinct segments, not dissimilar from the sectors of an economy, then weave them tightly back together in an elaborate, intertwined matrix so taut that pulling on any loose strand will cause the whole thing to fall apart.
