THE past season has done little to disprove a familiar lament: As far as Broadway is concerned, the straight play is dead.

In closing, I want to take note of the familiar lament that science and technology have created not just a cornucopia but terrible dangers as well.

"A familiar lament," Dorothy said.

He was echoing a familiar lament.

Everything he looked at was too expensive, a familiar lament, but then he stumbled on the place on West Broadway.

For all his accomplishments, Newsome has the familiar lament of a great player who never achieved the ultimate team accomplishment.

It is a familiar lament, heard at many points in American history.

It is a familiar lament in Bucharest that under the Communists there was money but no food and now there is food but no money.

But it is a familiar lament, the echoes of which were supposed to have died with last season.

When it was all over, Lamoriello, echoing the familiar lament of decades of statesmen, expressed disappointment at failing to achieve a concrete accord.