Word: gimmick
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When the foregoing matters are attended to, there will be left a very serviceable plot gimmick, involving a playboy who has just shot his seventh wife "in the fleshy part of the thigh." His defense is that having drunk two bottles of Scotch whiskey in twelve hours, he was not aware of what he was doing. When the prosecution adduces medical testimony to the effect that anybody with two-fifths of a gallon tucked in would be incapable of doing anything, a lad just out of Harvard Law is selected to save the situation by ingesting fifty-odd jiggers...
...life. Laurents, perhaps taking a cue from Jacqueline's dream in Rolland's novel Jean Christophe, has put them all on the same temporal plane--the present--so that the three can converse and interact with themselves, with Virginia, and with the other characters in the play. This dangerous gimmick, adumbrated in Death of a Salesman, works beautifully here and the result is highly effective theatre. It is a fine play, and some day will be generally recognized as such...
...About the only new-sounding gimmick the TV programers had promised for the new season were the "fantastics." CBS beat the drums for weeks over The World of Giants, a projected series about a man shrunk to 6-in. size by an accidental burst of radiation. Loudly sung but unsold WOG died before its tiny hero saw an electronic screen. Only fantastic now left on the CBS books: H. G. Wells s familiar old Invisible...
...amount in damages from 1) two small Jersey corporations that owned and operated the plane in which Todd was killed last March, and 2) Michael Todd Co. (chief stockholders: Liz and Mike), which shared in "maintaining and controlling" the plane. Suing their own company was a fairly standard legal gimmick to provide funds for Liz's 15-month-old daughter and to lessen the tax bite: damages paid on court judgment could be tax free...
...however, are not facets of her personality but rather three historical stages of her life. Laurents has put them all on the same temporal plane--the present--so that the three can converse and interact with themselves, with Virginia, and with the other characters in the play. This dangerous gimmick, adumbrated in Miller's Death of a Salesman, works beautifully here and the result is highly effective theatre...