Word: gimmick
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...characteristic Ayckbourn manner, the trilogy is built around an ingenious gimmick. Each of the plays tells of the same six characters in the same country house during the same long weekend; indeed, all three plays take place concurrently and tell the exact same story. What makes each one different is its vantage point. The first play, Table Manners, unfolds in the house's dining room; the second, Living Together, is set in the living room; the third takes the characters Round and Round the Garden. Though each play can stand on its own, the trilogy forms an enormous jigsaw puzzle...
...million debt from the building of his new chapel. The 500 parishioners were praying daily for the Lord to show them some way to pay their debt when, according to Tomer, God answered in the person of one Robert Philpot, a Dallas oilman. In search of a promotion gimmick to introduce his new engine additive, called Add-A-Tune, Philpot offered to buy one of Presley's planes (for $2 million) and take it on a fund-raising tour for the church. Next week, the Convair 880, named Lisa Marie for Presley's daughter, will take...
...psychological claptrap ought to be immediately excised: one of those Death of a Salesman-type closet skeletons, involving the time when little Jud woke up and saw Daddy making love to a woman who wasn't Mommy. Like the self-indulgent closing scene, Slade doesn't need this gimmick--he has done his work too thoroughly and too well in the earlier scenes...
...characters seem to need either a priest or an institution to order them to have faith. This may seem an almost sacrilegious thing to say about a man whose reputation is largely built on being a Catholic writer, but Catholicism for Greene is a prop. It's almost a gimmick, the straight man in a series of humorless, introspective routines. Want to introduce the possibility of belief into your characters' lives? Done--make them fallen or apostate Catholics. After that you don't even have to bother to flesh out the reasons for their guilt and self-contempt. The very...
...seemed at first that the conversion was just another idiosyncrasy, some kind of gimmick. It was nothing of the kind. Clay had actually changed his religion before the Listen fight. Harold Conrad, for mer sportswriter, sometime promoter, and, in the years when Ali was banished from the ring, tireless seeker after the means of his return, was privy to a prefight crisis...