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In Odesa, the deadly campaign of airstrikes has brought sharply renewed peril to nearly a million inhabitants of one of Ukraine’s most eclectic and cosmopolitan cities, known in equal measures for its people’s mordancy and joie de vivre.

Nothing in decades, he wrote, “comes close to the mordancy of … Greener Than You Think. Moore was the first writer to convincingly turn the tables on Los Angeles: The city that had for decades consumed nature in voracious bulldozer bites is itself bitten back and consumed. His novel is about the lawn that ate Hollywood. It is, by turns, the funniest and the most frightening Los Angeles disaster book ever written.”

Huff doesn’t mention that detail, but there’s mordancy in it; this is a play about the state of the nation.

“You’re not supposed to mourn someone before they die,” he notes, and in Tucci’s voice you hear both mordancy and the deepest kind of compassion.

Although much of Orton’s signature mordancy and wit has survived, his much-vaunted iconoclasm may strike some as tame by modern standards.