Imagine Samuel Beckett and the comedy team of Bob and Ray signing on to write an episode of "The Sopranos," with David Mamet and Richard Condon as dialogue advisers, and you'll have some idea of the tone of "The Dog Problem," which is directed by Scott Ellis and runs through Sunday at the Long Wharf.
I have also softened the tone: the problem of male underachievement is too serious to get lost in stale cultural debates of the 1990s.
That campaign, it should be noted, avoids the explicit you've-got-a-problem tone of typical pharmaceutical marketing.
But the tone of their approach to the problem could not be more different.
The tone of The Bell Jar is not its problem, but its triumph.
It leads to a problem of tone, of where exactly on the spectrum between comedy and thriller it is placing itself.
In a sign of growing involvement by party leaders, Speaker Nancy Pelosi met privately Thursday with Mr. Ickes and Maggie Williams, Mrs. Clinton's campaign manager, and discussed, among other topics, the Florida and Michigan primary problem, the tone of the campaign and the role of superdelegates.
In his previous two books, the weightless and unspecifying tone of voice was not a problem; he had carefully chosen the arena, and it would have been inappropriate to worry about the unyielding, unemotional formality of the sentences.
Both re-elected and defeated MPs told media that they chalked up the loss to the "tone" of the campaign, and a problem getting the party's message across.
You'll recapture the knowledge that the solving of problems requires a tone of voice quite different from a shout, and that calling your enemies a disparaging name is going to make it very likely that they are going to remain enemies.
