If there is a check list of traditional rom-com conceits, "What If" left few boxes empty, and yet there was something about it that made the format feel invigorated and new.
The truth is, the fans up here didn't come to watch a game, they came to party, a conceit most evident by the sea of empty beer cans and waste beneath the seats.
The Victorian conceit of the polar regions as a vast empty wilderness, and the preserve of white males battling against the elements, was far from the only polar vision.
The Victorian conceit of the polar regions as a vast empty wilderness a bastion of adventurous white males battling against the elements is far from the only polar vision.
Yet it only takes a passing police siren or an adjacent nightclub tipping empties into a recycling bin to bring our precious pasteboard conceit crashing down around our ears.
The museum's curator of communications, Simon Williams, declared that the work signified "the movement towards the dematerialisation of art since the 60s", but most of the general public seemed to reckon that an empty room with a light flicking on and off was a pretentious conceit.
It is up to the director and the actors of the moment to connect the dots, fill in details in the script's vast empty spaces and pull out all resources to turn Mr. Mamet's silly conceit, barely more than a skeletal outline, into a display piece that might validate it.
Brydon's heartbreaking, semi-delusional monologues created dramatic tension even while the cab was parked; the DIY video diary conceit helped explain away any technical shortcomings; and the prosaic backdrop echoed Keith's own emptied life.
In New York on a publicity shoot on May 1, the Spiegelworld character Gazillionaire - who according to the show's conceit is producing "Empire" but is too cheap to spring for an actual theater - gazed upon the empty site and proclaimed that building something beautiful in such forlorn surroundings "will be like New Yorkers finding a diamond in the rough".
For whatever reason, Time Warner Cable News reacted by placing an empty chair on the set next to Hagan's opponent, state Speaker Thom Tillis (R), and refusing to drop the conceit that this was a "debate" -- a move that caused Time Warner's newspaper partners, the Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer, to pull their participation in the proceedings.
