ISBN All in the Timing

All in the Timing

The world according to David Ives is a very add place, and his plays constitute a virtual stress test of the English language — and of the audience’s capacity for disorientation and delight. Ives’s characters plunge into black holes called "Philadelphias," where the simplest desires are hilariously thwarted. Chimps named Milton, Swift, and Kafka are locked in a room and made to re-create Hamlet. And a con man peddles courses in a dubious language in which "hello" translates as "velcro" and "fraud" comes out as "freud."

At once enchanting and perplexing, incisively intelligent and side-splittingly funny, this original paperback edition of Ives’s plays includes "Sure Thing," "Words, Words, Words," "The Universal Language," "Variations on the Death of Trotsky," "The Philadelphia," "Long Ago and Far Away," "Foreplay, or The Art of the Fugue," "Seven Menus," "Mere Mortals," "English Made Simple," "A Singular Kinda Guy," "Speed-the-Play," "Ancient History," and "Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread."


About author(s)
David Ives is the author of many popular one-act comedies for the stage, collected as All in the Timing and Time Flies. He is also the author of the young adult novels Monsieur Eek and Scrib. He is not Slobovian himself but speaks Slobovian fluently. He lives in New York City with his wife, Martha.