On a wintry Saturday afternoon recently I was sitting in the Anspacher Theater at the Public. It is a soaring, two-tiered room, the old atrium of the main reading room of the Astor Library. It rises on painted, cast-iron columns to a congregation of domed skylights. A weak, milky light filtered down more in sadness than in hope. The spindly chamber (what ceremonies of civic and cultural virtue had it witnessed? did Henry James know it? I must look up American Scene when I get home) was drafty; the bold gusts of wind were scarcely impeded by the thirty or so people huddled in the middle of the room. I had bought the TLS for the subway ride down and had been reading in it of Alan Hollinghurst’s new translation of Racine’s Bajazet as performed at London’s Almeida Theatre. I was keenly tempted to take the journal out of my pocket and continue reading. I remembered there was something on Bismarck; a new study of Jules Verne; I could tackle that review of A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility . . . anything. But minimal manners enforced a semblance of attention to the play in progress.

It was something called The Big Funk, a casual play or talk around the Polis, by John Patrick Shanley. In it five garrulous nonentities declaim at length on the meaninglessness of things. Characterization is attempted when obnoxious Omar throws rubber knives very near the audience (this was, however, insufficient to wake up