Word: gimmicks
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...success of things, and, in Jean Genet's terms, I suppose they did. But Genet's terms exclude most of what you and I respond to in the theater. The Balcony has no story in the normal sense and no real motivation for its characters. It does have a gimmick, a wonderful gimmick that Genet uses again and again, like a ritual. He leads us on an aimless trek down a hall of mirrors...
Minor Casualties. To help low income taxpayers, Kennedy proposes a new gimmick: an optional standard deduction that would entitle a taxpayer to deduct $300, plus $100 for each dependent (but not more than $1,000), even if this deduction amounted to more than 10% of his income-the present maximum percentage. For persons 65 or older, Kennedy would discard the extra $600 exemption and substitute a tax credit of $300. Since the $300 would be applied against the tax actually owed (while the $600 exemption merely reduces taxable income), the change would be a net benefit for taxpayers...
Grass, a 35-year-old ex-tombstone carver, is probably the most inventive talent to be heard from anywhere since the war. In The Tin Drum, he employs every technique from realism to surrealism, every tone from a whisper to a howl. The gaudiest gimmick in his literary bag of tricks, however, is a character named Oskar Matzerath. For Oskar is that wildly distorted mirror which, held up to a wildly deformed reality, gives back a recognizable likeness...
...until even a Kansas City house dick would get the idea. Hachette teaches the future tense in a setting where any other tense would be out of place: a fortuneteller's booth. To help learners catch elusive French intonation, Hachette uses another gimmick in the lesson on the interrogative: a violin trilling up to accent Dawn Addams' voice...
...device is not inherently invalid and unbelievable, as the critics maintained. The falling-off in the third act cannot be laid to one gimmick. No; it is more generalized than that. What Albee failed to do was to keep up the drive and level of writing achieved in the first two acts. Let no-one think that Act III is weak by itself; it simply pales after the two hours of extraordinarily sustained energy that precede...