If It Ain't Baroque...

Some of this weakness can be attributed to inexperience: Moses is trying to portray the frustrations and failures of middle age without much knowledge or insight. It's telling that by far the most effective sequence in Bachis when Joel Leffert as Schott reveals the enduring bitterness he felt when, as a young student, his application to the St. Thomas school was rejected. A direct echo of this strong sentiment can be heard in a column Moses wrote in the Yale Daily News in 1999 when still an undergraduate. His subject: the pain of a rejected grad school application. Like many a writer before him, Moses has the audacity and verbal facility to venture into bold musings far afield of his own experience, but he is much more effective when he sticks to what he knows. When he strays, he's in danger of being the subject of one of his own character's barbs: "He takes quite some time to say very little."