Yet while the show - which features the estimable Shirley Knight, Diane Venora and Catherine Kellner - bristles with tantalizing topics, it never shapes them into a seductive dramatic structure, working instead in abrupt and often stale emotional sound bites.
Yet despite its many moments of awfulness, this show still bristles with intelligence and ambition.
The band, improvising formally, produced loose, compositionally sound music that made the show bristle with excitement.
Even if "Artificial Excavation" were to open on Broadway, it would probably do little to change Eisenman's marginal standing, for the show bristles with the esthetic and rhetorical mannerisms that have kept this architect and his audience in a mutual state of oscillation between attraction and repulsion.
One might almost forget that Mr. Stella once strode the art world like a colossus, except that the show bristles with intelligence and ambition (Smith).