David Ives

Biography

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.

Source:
Wikipedia contributors, "David Ives," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David Ives&oldid=96321289 (accessed February 12, 2007). [Read More...]

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