But staged with firecracker snap by David Warren and illuminated by several incandescent performances, "Pterodactyls" offers, for its first three-quarters, as much antic fizz as any comedy in town.
Without an incandescent performance at its center, "Digging to China" follows the same path as Harriet's balloon escape.
Much of that work's resonance had to do with the emotionally incandescent performances of its stars, Michael Gambon and Lia Williams.
Laura Linney's emotionally incandescent performance has the effect of entirely shifting the focus of Donald Margulies's fine drama from 1992 about art, time and moral compromise.
Although Sonia is a wildly contradictory and symbolically overweighted character, Miss Davila's incandescent performance almost makes this holy child-woman who survives on faith alone believable.
Rather, it emerges through the astonishingly incandescent performance of the City Ballet dancers, as a distillation of both the show and the spirit of an age.
The story hurtles to its conclusion, propelled by Schreiber's uncanny, incandescent performance.
Fueled by Mr. McBurney's incandescent performance, it is a portrait of the artist as political and spiritual renegade, a one-man wildfire that ultimately proved uncontainable.
She says volumes in an incandescent performance that will go down as one of her finest.
The child, with her gap-toothed smile and tragic eyes, gives an incandescent performance.