No other recent American playwright has won so much respect and admiration for his one-acts, and the six entries chosen for All in the Timing are a testament to David Ives’s linguistic ingenuity. But he’s more than clever; Ives has the craft and stamina to turn his seemingly one-joke ideas into hugely satisfying comedies.
Already a minor classic, Words Words Words, like an optimistic Oleanna, turns the gap between the sexes into a cagey verbal contest. Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread is a dead-on spoof of the composer’s fracturing of time -- very often to no profound purpose.
The Philadelphia (which has something to offend almost every state of the union) is a hilarious treatment of the parallel-universe theme. Here one man’s “Philadelphia” (where everything in his life goes wrong) is another man’s “Los Angeles” (where things still go wrong but who cares?). After seeing Variations on the Death of Trotsky, suffice to say you’ll never hear the revolutionist’s name again without picturing him with a pick-axe smashed (though not buried) in his head.
Words Words Words, based on the infinite-number-of-typing-apes theory, runs on past its amusing punchline, but Ives’s newest, The Universal Language, boasts an entire vocabulary based on puns and onomatopoeia. Although it gets a little silly, Language is Ives’s most dazzlingly virtuosic piece to date.
And speaking of virtuosity, cheers to the cast under Jason McConnell Buzas’s hair-trigger direction: it is all in the timing. Special praise, though, for Robert Stanton, who jumps effortlessly from yuppie to monkey to professor of gibberish to Philip Glass (or are the last two redundant?). A treat from opening bell to final fade.
