David Ives

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David Ives (born 1950) is a contemporary American playwright. His plays are often, but not always, one-act; and often, but not always, comedies. They are notable for their verbal dexterity, theatrical invention, and quirky humor.

1 Life and works
2 Musical theatre
3 Children's literature
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Life and works

Ives' most popular book of plays is All in the Timing, which originated as an evening of one-act comedies that premiered at Primary Stages in 1993, moved to the larger John Houseman Theatre, and ran for 606 performances. The evening won him the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award for Playwriting.

The most well known play from "All in the Timing" is "The Philadelphia," which is about a man who thinks he is just having a bad day, only to be informed by his friend that he has actually fallen into a metaphysical hole called a Philadelphia. In a Philadelphia everything goes wrong: the taxis don't take you where you want to go, the newsstands don't sell your newspaper, and no matter what you order at a restaurant, you'll end up with a cheesesteak.

In the mid-1990s, after having been a contributor to Spy Magazine, he wrote many occasional humor pieces for the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and other publications. In that same period, New York Magazine named him one of the "100 Smartest New Yorkers."

A native of South Chicago's steel-mill district, Ives attended a minor Catholic seminary and Northwestern University and, after some years' interval, Yale School of Drama, where he received an MFA in playwriting. In the interval between Northwestern and Yale he worked for three years as an editor at Foreign Affairs magazine.

His first play in New York was Canvas, at the Circle Repertory Company in 1972, followed at the same theatre by Saint Freud in 1975.

He first attracted the critics' notice, however, in the late 1980s with a string of original one-act comedies that began to appear annually in the Manhattan Punch Line's yearly one-act play festival. Those plays, along with others written later, formed the evenings, All in the Timing, Mere Mortals, and Lives of the Saints. Among the best-known of his one-act comedies are Sure Thing, Words, Words, Words, Variations on the Death of Trotsky, Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread, and The Universal Language.

The short pieces are especially popular with high-school drama students and college performers, and are a staple of drama competitions. Most of them can be found in the anthologies All in the Timing and Mere Mortals. His full-length plays up to 2005 are collected in Polish Joke And Other Plays. The title play, Polish Joke, is a surrealistic but humorous glimpse into Ives's Polish-American background.

[edit] Musical theatre

In the early 1990s he started working in music theatre with the libretto for an opera based on Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (music by Greg Pliska). It premiered in Philadelphia in 1991 at the Pennsylvania Opera Theatre.

He then became a regular adapter in New York's celebrated "Encores!" series of classic American musicals in concert, working on two or three a year for the next dozen or more years. He continues working in the series to this day. His "Encores!" adaptation of "Wonderful Town" moved to Broadway's Beck Theatre in 2003, directed by Kathleen Marshall.

In the late 1990s he had adapted David Copperfield's magic show, Dreams and Nightmares, for Broadway, also at the Beck. He also adapted Cole Porter's Jubilee and Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific (with Reba McEntire) for concert performances at Carnegie Hall.

In 2002, he did brush-up work on the German transfer, Dance of the Vampires, with book, music and lyrics by rock-and-roll legend Jim Steinman and original German book and lyrics by Michael Kunze. It flopped, closing in early 2003.

He co-wrote the book for Irving Berlin's White Christmas, which premiered in San Francisco in 2004 and has been seen across the country since. Most recently, he did a new translation of Feydeau's classic farce, A Flea in Her Ear, which premiered in Chicago in 2006.

[edit] Children's literature

In 2001 Ives ventured into children's literature with the novel, Monsieur Eek, which he followed in 2005 with Scrib. He lives in New York City with his wife, Martha.