ordinariness

He’s not only the show’s tragically doomed protagonist but also its storyteller, and he anchors the production with a handsome ordinariness.

During a rehearsal for “Swim Like Me,” less than a week before previews, Valk asked Berryman to slow down the cadence of a monologue about the ordinariness of his name.

“The horror was in the house. Fascism starts in the family anyway, so there was something about the ordinariness and the familiarity of that ordinariness. It was just utterly captivating.”

Finally, after a prompt for “terrifying normality,” it produced what it described as “a completely blank, featureless white canvas,” which it said “represents the very essence of ordinariness taken to its absolute limit.”

Its extraordinary run arguably can be attributed to its ordinariness: In making its characters’ commonplace concerns the stuff of an upbeat, crowd-pleasing musical, “Waitress” connected with, and ultimately won over, what might be Broadway’s most underappreciated audience: women.