bleakness

“But he’s one of the most effective presidents we’ve had since Roosevelt or at least since Johnson. Trump’s an authoritarian. Why would anyone want to live in that bleakness? Republicans have brought on seven of the last eight recessions. I don’t want to go broke.”

Beckett might have a reputation for bleakness, but he was also a sporting man who loved rugby, cricket, tennis, attractive women, male friendship and good whiskey.

Michieletto’s “Samson et Dalila” staging was scheduled for New York in 2018 but was scrapped when Met general manager Peter Gelb concluded it was “somewhat unrelieved in its bleakness.”

“No false tone of healing or hope is sounded at the end; instead, the circles of complicity keep widening. What rescues the opera from utter bleakness is the inherent beauty of Saariaho’s writing.”

“The bleakness of its vision is enriched by the author’s exquisite eye and ear for detail,” Joyce Carol Oates wrote in the New York Times in 1986.