Exotic Foods

New York

Anton Chekhov’s plays, sublime though they are, have a well-deserved reputation for being hard directorial nuts to crack. This may explain why “The Cherry Orchard” doesn’t get done nearly as often as it should in this country. Take Classic Stage Company’s ambitious “Chekhov Initiative” cycle, which has been, perhaps inevitably, a hit-or-miss affair in which a very fine “Seagull,” directed by Viacheslav Dolgachev in 2008, was followed by Austin Pendleton’s interesting but exceedingly uneven “Uncle Vanya” and “Three Sisters.” This time around, though, CSC has covered itself in glory, giving “The Cherry Orchard” a staging directed by Andrei Belgrader and led by John Turturro, Juliet Rylance and Dianne Wiest that is as good as anything you’re likely to see on a New York stage this season—or anywhere else, at any other time.

What makes Mr. Belgrader’s “Cherry Orchard” so noteworthy? To begin with, he’s struck the right balance between comedy and melancholy, which is the key to making Chekhov’s masterpiece work onstage. If it’s not funny, it becomes lugubrious; if it’s too broad, like the slapsticky version that Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company mounted four years ago, the results can swing perilously near vulgarity. Mr. Belgrader nails it, giving full value to the farcical side of the Gaevs, Chekhov’s impoverished family of aristocratic landowners, without ever letting you forget that theirs is the plight of a once-dignified class that has reached the end of its rope.

While everyone in the stellar cast is on Mr. Belgrader’s wavelength, it is Mr. Turturro whose performance is most essential to the effect of the production. He plays Lopakhin, the up-and-coming merchant who buys the estate on which his ancestors worked as slaves, with a bitter touch of Shylock-like vengefulness—yet he is no less alive to Lopakhin’s ludicrous, even pathetic side. The hideously grotesque dance of triumph into which he breaks when he proclaims himself “the new master” of the Gaev estate will burn itself into your memory, never thereafter to be forgotten.

Space precludes anything like a full accounting of the manifold virtues of this production, which include a deeply incised cameo by Alvin Epstein as Fiers, the Gaevs’ doddering old manservant. Ms. Wiest is sweetly poignant, Ms. Rylance ablaze with quiet anguish, and the nursery-room furniture of Santo Loquasto’s set discreetly underlines the futility of the Gaevs’ lives without ever getting in the viewer’s way.

Classic Stage has commissioned a new translation by John Christopher Jones, a Russian-speaking American actor who appeared in the company’s “Seagull” and who has hand-tailored his rendering of “The Cherry Orchard” to fit the members of this cast. It’s an impeccably theatrical piece of work that is both beautifully speakable and more poetic than Paul Schmidt’s now-standard version. (Schmidt: “Well, it’s all over now, and I never even had a life to live.” Jones: “My life’s happened without me, it’s as if I’d never been born.”) If you need any more reasons to see CSC’s “Cherry Orchard,” add that to the list.

***

Speaking of tough nuts, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival has imported Dublin’s Gate Theatre revival of “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Samuel Beckett’s hour-long 1958 “duologue” for an angry old writer (John Hurt, made up to look like Beckett himself) who listens to a tape recording of himself when young and can’t stand what he hears. Indeed, he doesn’t seem to like much of anything except bananas, a fruit for which he has a weakness bordering on compulsion.

“Krapp” is, like all of Beckett’s plays, a black comedy of the utmost horror and despair, and Mr. Hurt, who famously played the title role in Atom Egoyan’s 2000 television version, is once again in perfect harmony with Krapp’s agony. Directed by Michael Colgan with scrupulous faithfulness to Beckett’s text, he shows us a self-obsessed artist who, having chosen between (in Yeats’s phrase) “perfection of the life, or of the work,” has lived to regret his decision to opt for the solitary pursuit of his elusive muse. While it is the sheer physicality of Mr. Hurt’s performance that impresses most—he totters about the stage with the squeaky-shoed grace of the music-hall clowns that Beckett loved—you will be no less stunned by the sound of his creaky, rusty voice, which suggests a hermit who never has occasion to speak a word aloud for months at a time.

Mr. Hurt’s capacity for silence, alas, was not matched by that of the opening-night audience, which filled too many of his long pauses with unwelcome coughs. That’s a small price to pay for so profound a performance, but be prepared to pay it.

Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

By LEE LAWRENCE

Boston

When Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts opened its new American wing a year ago, it gave curators in the old wing a chance to rethink their purview. Kicking off changes in the Asia department, Laura Weinstein recently completed the South and Southeast Asian Sculpture Gallery.

Hers is the fourth major rethinking of this collection since the museum created a Section of Indian Art in 1917. The first such department in the country, it was headed by the influential art historian and collector Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, and this installation is in some ways a return to Coomaraswamy’s ideals—with key differences. While Coomaraswamy liked to present India as a cohesive and closed unit, Ms. Weinstein draws attention to art’s disregard for borders by mingling some 120 works from South and Southeast Asia in a chronological progression from the third millennium B.C. to the 19th century.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

‘Conversion of Nanda,’ a fragment of an Ajanta mural.

Then, through juxtapositions and the occasional wall text, she invites us to ferret out the elements that cultures share and those that make each distinct. This is a gutsy move that places engagement with art over historical narrative. Visitors could use a few more enticing tidbits in the labels, but the strategy works. When we face two 11th-century bronzes of female deities, we are struck by the fact that they are roughly the same size, equally voluptuous and beautifully cast, and that both sport elaborate headdresses. But the one from South Asia is all sensuality and movement—right hip thrust out, left leg bent, one bejeweled arm trailing gracefully while the other, crooked, holds a lotus. The companion statue, by contrast, presents the goddess unadorned, facing straight ahead, feet parallel, posture erect. From the Khmer Empire in today’s northern Thailand, she is a study in rectitude.

The museum amassed much of its collection in the early decades of the 20th century, when great South and Southeast Asian works were readily available. And a striking feature of its reconceived parade of masterpieces is the use of male and female representations. The first space is animated by dynamic female figures. A curvaceous, “all-woman” torso of a tree spirit—or yakshi—commands center stage while, to the side, a relief from the late first to early second century shows women flying to pay homage to the Buddha, here represented only by footprints. Sometime between the second and first centuries B.C., artists began to fashion images of the Buddha, and we feel this shift in the second space, where more static male Hindu gods are joined by Buddhas—including a not-to-be-missed early example from Mathura (India). Carved in red sandstone, it depicts the Buddha as a young man sitting in full lotus, the delicacy of his facial features as realistic as the ever so slight imbalance of his posture.

From then on, Buddhist icons mingle with Hindu deities, some friendly, others fierce and one that manages to be both. A 6½-foot-tall guardian sculpted in 14th-century Java (Indonesia) stands poised to defend with one arm raised, legs slightly bent, a strand of skulls looping across his chest like a bandolier.

While Coomaraswamy mingled art and craft, almost all the works here are sculptures and reliefs, with two notable exceptions. Although paintings will rotate in the new adjoining gallery—currently “Gems of Rajput Painting” showcases works from India’s northwest and central regions—the sculpture gallery includes a fragment from a late-fifth-century mural from the Ajanta Buddhist cave complex in northwest India. It is the only such piece known to have survived the journey from looter to colonial collector to auction. The other exception is a display of 11th- through 19th-century Vietnamese ceramics—a tad incongruous, though their recurring Chinese motifs remind us that connections extended all across Asia.

There is also the rare nod to original context—the suggestion of a doorway atop which hangs an elaborately carved stone lintel; the yakshi placed at a slight tilt to remind us she once formed the diagonal bracket on a stone gate. But the objects themselves are mostly at eye level, marking yet another departure, this time from this installation’s immediate predecessor. Then, such objects were placed higher to evoke the original relationship between viewer and sculpture. Ms. Weinstein has shifted the emphasis to the works’ current context: the museum. With pedestals blending into the slate-blue shades of the walls, the artworks appear to float in a timeless space, enhancing the sense that every piece is but a fragment from a rich past.

Coomaraswamy would no doubt approve. He was the first art historian to manipulate photographs of Indian sculptures to divorce them from the temple wall or carved gateway and present them as independent works of art. This was more than an aesthetic choice. Even though he was half Sri Lankan, half British, he was a committed Indian nationalist who believed that art had a central role to play in gaining India’s independence. Its art, as worthy as that of the West, proved that Indians had a long and rich history and were united by a single national spirit. In the same vein, he pointed to the role Indian art played as a source for artistic developments across Asia—but to call them “Indian colonial,” he wrote in his 1927 “History of Indian and Indonesian Art,” would do “an injustice to the vigor and originality of the local cultures.”

No such injustice has been committed here, either to the art of India or that of Southeast Asia.

Ms. Lawrence is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Corrections & Amplifications: An earlier version of this story misstated the period when the museum began its South and Southeast Asian collection.

By DAVID LITTLEJOHN

Berkeley, Calif.

There are three things to keep in mind about “Desdemona,” a collaboration of writer Toni Morrison, Malian composer/singer Rokia Traoré and director Peter Sellars that had its U.S. premiere here last week and begins its two-night New York run on Wednesday.

First, this project, which opened in a suburb of Paris last month, after previews in Vienna and Brussels, has very little to do with Shakespeare’s “Othello,” although it borrows names, events and lines from the original.

Second, Ms. Morrison and Mr. Sellars have transformed the maid of Desdemona’s mother in Shakespeare’s play into Desdemona’s nurse, nanny and closest childhood friend—and a black African slave. What Mr. Sellars calls a “little-known fact”—that Desdemona was raised by a black African slave, which helped pave the way for her marriage to Othello—is simply not justified by Shakespeare’s text. The claim is based on the word “Barbary,” the name the woman is given in some modern texts of or references to “Othello.” But centuries of scholars and readers have assumed that the character’s name is just a variant of Barbara, and many editions call her just that. In the First Folio (of 1623), when the editors want to refer to Africa they use the word “Barbary” (Iago calls Othello a “Barbary horse”). But when they refer to the maid of Desdemona’s mother, the text reads “Barbarie”—a nickname, like Barb’ry (or, in Samuel Pepys’s Diary, Barbary) Allen, of the old Scottish folksong.

Third, Ms. Morrison’s text is highly polemical, in ways that Shakespeare never dreamed. (Such a twist is almost universal in Mr. Sellars’s productions of classic plays and operas.) It is single-mindedly feminist, even antimale, throughout. Mild, innocent, docile Desdemona comes off as an angrier Gloria Steinem or Susan Faludi. The text is also, of course, antiracist and (toward the end) heavily, abstractly antiwar, with the blame for these evils placed squarely on men. One of the stories with which Othello won Desdemona’s heart, we are told, was that of the Amazons. An Amazon must remain a virgin until she kills her man. Then she washes her face in his blood, makes a belt of his intestines and a throne of his bones. Desdemona longs to be one of them.

The stage is bare, except for five little floor altars made of bars of white light surrounded by empty bottles and glasses. On the black backdrop (along with colored lines of neon) appear large, white supertitles for some (but not all) of the songs sung in Bambara by Ms. Traoré and her backup trio—three sleek African Supremes who writhe and chant in unison. On this screen are also projected—needlessly, distractingly—the lines clearly and eloquently read by Tina Benko, the blond American actress who plays Desdemona, recalling her life from the Afterlife, when “I can speak at last.” Two men sit off to the left playing African stringed instruments. Everyone is dressed in white, the five women in identical shoulder-and-arm-baring long gowns of woven Malian cloth.

Desdemona spends the first half hour of the unbroken two-hour show filling in the back-story of her life before she met Othello. She despised her upper-class, convention-bound Venetian upbringing, and could escape only in the fantastic stories that her beloved Barbary told her of exotic places and other gods, unruled by men and custom. After Barbary died—the victim of a broken heart—Desdemona’s father plied his child with local suitors. Desdemona rejected them all. She longed for “a wider world, seas beyond our canals.” One evening Othello, the new African commander, came to dinner, and she saw in his eyes “a gleam like Barbary’s.” They danced, and she felt “we had known each other all our lives.” Ms. Traoré and her trio respond like a wild Greek chorus: Only your anger, your rage, your fury, they warn Othello, can destroy the one you love. In a moving meeting in the Afterlife, Desdemona and Barbary (now acted as well as sung by Ms. Traoré) thrash out the truth. (“You were my best friend.” “I was your slave.”) Barbary ends by singing the melancholy “Willow Song” that she taught Desdemona as a girl.

Ms. Morrison’s version goes off the tracks when she tries to explain Desdemona’s and Othello’s marriage, and its tragic end. Othello never believed Iago’s lies for a minute, we are told (there goes Shakespeare’s plot), but killed his wife because it was his nature to kill—he took pleasure in rape and destruction, and he could not bear the false image of himself with which Desdemona had fallen in love. I see no way to make this reconception credible, but the creative team could have dropped 15 minutes of the droning, repetitive music from the second half and the entire offstage (and uncredited) speech of Cassio near the end.

Despite my objections to the radically altered premise—that the story of Othello has nothing to do with deception and jealousy, and everything to do with the cruel nature of men—there is much to admire in “Desdemona,” notably the performances of the two leads. Stick-thin, her spine rigid, her hair close-cropped, Ms. Traoré has a voice that can leap from a low, keening wail to a high warbling cry. Ms. Benko’s voice is slow and controlled, whisper-soft (except when she is angry) but always audible. She does justice to the author’s often richly poetic text, and plays many characters well—Desdemona, Othello, both their mothers and Desdemona’s lady-in-waiting, Emilia—often in conversations with one another in the Afterlife.

Mr. Littlejohn writes for the Journal on West Coast events.

The Big Splurge

Tiger Golf Tour

Getty Images

Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand

No, not that Tiger. Julian Robertson, retired owner of the Tiger Fund, also created three luxurious golf resorts in different corners of New Zealand, which are ranked among the finest in the world. A new nine-day tour loops through them all, with stays at the Lodge at Kauri Cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean; the Farm at Cape Kidnappers in Hawke’s Bay wine country; and Matakauri Lodge on adventure-friendly Lake Wakatipu. The mighty steep price doesn’t include international airfare, but it does cover everything else: meals, helicopter trips, sailing excursions, horseback rides, winery tours and, of course, golf. From about $26,600 per couple; kauricliffs.com

The Cultural Escape

Asia’s Wright Stuff

Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust

The Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust is leading a 12-day guided tour to Japan.

Frank Lloyd Wright was influenced by Japanese style for much of his life. On March 28, the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust is leading a 12-day guided tour to Japan, to explore the art that the architect took to heart. The journey passes through several cities (Tokyo, Kyoto, Atami, Osaka…), Wright’s three extant Japanese buildings, and a number of temples, museums and gardens. From $6,495 per person, including lodging, most meals, domestic transportation and entrance fees; wrightwaytravel.org

—Sara Clemence

By JEFFREY WASSERSTROM

The Granger Collection

Painting of Chinese government forces attacking a Taiping stronghold at Tientsin (now Tianjin) in northern China.

In the early 1860s, a violent fight raged to determine the fate of a vast country. An insurrection had split it in two, leaving much of the southern half governed by men who claimed to be the leaders of a new state but were dismissed by their foes as illegitimate “rebels,” outlaws who had given themselves fancy titles. The conflict involved legendary generals with names that schoolchildren still memorize, and it had not just local but international significance: In far-off London, debates raged over whether the British Empire should back the rebels, with whom some Britons felt a sympathetic bond.

American readers might naturally assume that this description refers to our Civil War. In fact, I had in mind an Asian conflict, which may be little known to Americans today but which was far bloodier than the struggle that pitted Grant against Lee (tens of millions dead, compared with under a million). The insurgents with fancy titles in this case were the self-proclaimed “Kings” of the Taiping Uprising, a movement that at its apogee held sway over a territory roughly the size of Italy.

Hong Xiuquan (1814-64), the “Heavenly King” who was the movement’s supreme leader, strove to transform China by fulfilling a quasi-Christian millenarian prophecy. A frustrated scholar who had been exposed to a missionary tract while preparing to take the all-important civil-service examination that would secure him a post in the official bureaucracy, Hong went into a trance after failing the grueling test and awoke convinced that he was Christ’s younger brother, selected by God to save China from rule by barbarian “demons,” his term for the Manchu members of the Qing royal family.

Stephen Platt’s “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom” is an impressive, gracefully written account of the war that ensued. Like many historians of our War Between the States, Mr. Platt presents stirring accounts of battles and finely etched portraits of military commanders. On the insurgent side, the commanders included figures like Chen Yucheng (aka the “Brave King”), who started his life in poverty and ended it near the top of the Taiping hierarchy. Ranged against Chen were men such as Li Hongzhang, a famous military modernizer, and Li’s mentor, Zeng Guofan. A shrewd strategist torn by competing loyalties—to his family, his home province of Hunan and the dynasty he served—Zeng did more than anyone else to topple Hong’s Taiping Kingdom. Mr. Platt’s richly textured portrait of this complex, conflicted official is one of the strengths of the book.

At strategic points, Mr. Platt underscores the historical links between the American and Chinese conflagrations, reminding the reader of intersections between a pair of conflicts that have typically been treated separately. We learn of gunboats bound for America that change direction to head toward Asia and of international trade being affected by the simultaneous disruption of the flow of cotton from the South and the flow of tea from China. Many observers of the time saw the wars as analogous: To the Scottish member of Parliament Alexander Dunlop, Mr. Platt writes, “the parallels between the Confederacy and the Taiping were as plain as day.” He also quotes Dunlop arguing that “the Taepings had waged war successfully with the Emperor of China for a long time and were as much entitled to be recognized as belligerents as the Secession States of America.”

Those parallels should not be taken too far, however. The Chinese conflict, which began in the early 1850s, lasted roughly three times as long as the American one. While Abraham Lincoln was confronted with a single military challenge, the Qing had to contend with several. As Mr. Platt notes, the Second Opium War (1858-60), which culminated in British and French forces winning important diplomatic concessions from the dynasty, took place alongside the Taiping Uprising. In addition, the period saw more than one major insurrection, a point to which Mr. Platt might have given more attention. By the mid-1860s Qing officials sometimes felt that the Muslim Rebellion on China’s western frontier posed as great a threat to the dynasty’s survival as the Taiping Uprising.

Perhaps the biggest contrast between the civil wars in America and China has to do with aims and ideology. The Confederate leaders sought to preserve the South’s status quo ante, but Hong believed he had a holy mission to depose the Manchu, to return China to governance by ethnic Chinese and to usher in an era of “Taiping” (Great Peace). By the early 1860s, Hong Xiuquan was behaving much like a traditional emperor, enjoying a lavish lifestyle and living in a palace. At its start, though, his movement had an egalitarian streak, with Taiping leaders making much of the need to divide all wealth equally among all true believers.

This helps explain why, a century later, Mao would hail Hong as a “revolutionary” leader who, despite eccentric beliefs, had precociously progressive, proto-socialist ideals. By contrast, Mao’s rival, Chiang Kai-shek, who insisted that the Communists were “bandits” beholden to a strange and decidedly un-Chinese ideology, claimed that the true hero of the 1860s was not the fanatic Hong but Zeng, the restorer of Confucian order.

The Taiping Uprising has inspired an enormous literature in Chinese and a much smaller but still significant amount of writing in English. Some authors focus on the movement’s leader—a case in point being Jonathan Spence’s learned yet accessible “God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan” (1996). Others have concentrated on the movement’s beliefs and goals, as Vincent Shih did in “The Taiping Ideology” (1973) and Rudolf Wagner did in “Reenacting the Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping Rebellion” (1982). Works like Philip Kuhn’s “Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China” (1970) place the story in the context of China’s long history of struggles between dynasties and those seeking to topple them, while Jen Yu-wen’s “The Taiping Revolutionary Movement” (1973) goes further, insisting that Hong’s movement had more in common with the revolutions that followed it than rebellions of earlier times.

Much recent scholarship on the Taiping Uprising, however, has shown the value in approaching the 1860s as a time when China was wracked by a civil war not completely unlike the one taking place on the other side of the Pacific. Now, with “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom,” Mr. Platt presents the first book-length foray in this direction, providing a compelling alternative account of much-studied events that feels both a bit old-fashioned (in its panoramic view of battles and leaders) yet also very much in step with recent scholarship, placing national stories into global frameworks.

I only wish Mr. Platt had brought in one final Civil War-related connection, which has special meaning as the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s China trip draws near. In the 1970s, Nixon became the first sitting American president to visit that country, but in the 1870s Ulysses S. Grant was the first former occupant of the White House to do so. One official that Grant met in China was Li Hongzhang, by then a viceroy. According to a letter published in the New York Herald, before meeting the famous American he had long admired, the viceroy noted how “funny” it was to have a surname so like that of “General Grant’s opponent.” This fact notwithstanding, Grant and Li became friends, which perhaps should not surprise us, given something important they had in common. “General Grant and I,” the viceroy reportedly said at one point during Grant’s visit to China, “have suppressed the two greatest rebellions known in history.”

—Mr. Wasserstrom is the author of “China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

EARLY LEARNING

Bye-Bye, Bambi

Nature’s presence is shrinking in children’s picture books, according to a study of the nearly 300 volumes that have won Caldecott Medals and honors since the prize debuted in 1938. Bestowed by the American Library Association, the Caldecott is the highest award given to picture books.

Researchers coded more than 8,000 images from the books, noting whether they showed natural settings, man-made environments or something in-between (like a manicured lawn). In the prize’s early days, natural and built environments were equally represented, but natural settings began a steady decline in the late 1960s. By 2008, readers were twice as likely to encounter an image of a built environment as a natural one.

Images of animals, whether wild or domestic, declined slowly but steadily over the period, too. The authors suggest that the shift is partly a result of more and more Americans living in cities.

“The Human-Environment Dialog in Award-Winning Children’s Picture Books,” J. Allen Williams, Jr., Christopher Podeschi, Nathan Palmer, Philip Schwadel and Deanna Meyler, Sociological Inquiry (February)

COGNITION

IQ Ignorance Is Bliss

High achievers did better on an IQ test taken in isolation than on a second one administered in a competitive situation that gave them real-time feedback about how their peers were performing.

In the competitive environment, five participants at a time took a test on a computer and immediately learned how they were doing relative to the others. Performance fell for all the test-takers, but some recovered toward the end, performing roughly as they had alone. The performance of another group, with women overrepresented, stayed low throughout. (The two groups had done equally well in isolation.)

Brain scans showed that all participants felt physiological stress at first, but by the end of the test, stress markers largely disappeared for the high scorers in the competitive section.

“Implicit Signals in Small Group Settings and Their Impact on the Expression of Cognitive Capacity and Associated Brain Responses,” Kenneth T. Kishida, Dongni Yang, Karen Hunter Quartz, Steven R. Quartz and P. Read Montague, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (forthcoming)

POLITICAL SCIENCE

The First Shall Be First

About 10% of city-council and school-board officials elected in recent years in California owe their jobs to being listed first on the ballot, a study finds.

Ballot order surely affects voters’ choices elsewhere, too, but the researchers chose California because the state randomizes the order in which names appear on ballots. If order alone didn’t matter, winners should emerge in equal proportions from every spot.

That wasn’t the case, researchers found, as they looked at nearly 8,000 local elections, from 1995 to 2008. Another find: Candidates in the middle of the ballot were disadvantaged by the placement.

Given the unfair advantage, you’d expect politicians who won from the No. 1 spot to be weaker than average. Indeed, the researchers confirmed that they were more likely than other officeholders to lose their seat in the next election.

“On the Causes and Consequences of Ballot Order Effects,” Marc Meredith and Yuval Salant, Political Behavior (forthcoming)

A Bullet With Smarts

A self-guided bullet developed at Sandia National Laboratories can come within eight inches of a target 3,300 feet away, computer simulations have shown.

Most bullets rely on rapid spinning, or rifling, to stay on target, but this one has controllable fins that make midair course corrections possible. After the 4-inch bullet explodes from a smooth bore, sensors in the nose detect a laser beam trained on the target, and an onboard processor sends instructions to the fins—as many as 30 directional tweaks per second. Prototypes of the killer dart haven’t yet achieved the accuracy of the computer model.