Chicago-born David Ives attended college at Northwestern University and then studied at the Yale School of Drama. He began his playwriting career in the early 1970’s, and has produced a varied body of work, including screen plays, full-length dramas, and short comic sketches. Many of the latter have been produced at Manhattan Punch Line Theater, Lincoln Center, the Williamstown Theater Festival, and Ensemble Studio Theater.
Among his longer works are the full-length plays Ancient History (1989), which he describes as a two-act "screwball tragedy," and The Red Address, a tragicomic study of transvestitism and sexual identity produced at the Magic Theater in San Francisco in 1991.
Ives has also written for television, serving as staff writer for Fox TV's Urban Anxiety. In addition, he wrote the libretto for the opera, The Secret Garden, which premiered at the Pennsylvania Opera Theater in 1991.
A humor columnist as well as a playwright, Ives's comic musings have appeared frequently in the pages of The New York Times. In one piece, he sketches out the contributions of great philosophers to the arts of cooking and eating, citing Descartes’ dictum, "I eat therefore I expand," and introducing his readers to such neglected classics as Plato's Brunch, and Aristotle's Guide to Cheap Nicomachian Restaurants.
This capacity to exploit the philosophical tradition for its comic potential would emerge most strikingly in his best-known work, All in the Timing -- an evening of six short comedies which opened at Primary Stages, a 99-seat theater in New York in December, 1993. In March of 1994 it moved to the 499-seat John Houseman Theater, located on Forty-second Street's "Theater Row." An immense success, the show was subsequently produced in major cities throughout the United States and Canada, and published in American Theater magazine as an outstanding example of contemporary American drama.
New York Times critic Vincent Canby praised All in the Timing as a collection of "sketches for some hilarious, celestially conceived review," seeing in these playlets the "density of thought and precision of poetry." The Washington Post described the show metaphorically as "Lewis Carroll meets the Marx Brothers at a party catered by James Joyce." The Post also saw Ives's work as a "verbal M.C. Escher" drawing. And Benjamin Brantley of The Times declared that "Mr. Ives's themes may owe much to the philosophical arcana of such dense thinkers as Einstein and Derrida."
For Ives such high praise came as an overwhelming surprise. He describes himself as having spent the twenty years before All in the Timing achieving, at best, modest success as a playwright. He also notes that five of the playlets had been produced individually elsewhere without eliciting much enthusiasm. (“The Universal Language” was the only new work on the bill.) It was only when all of the works were performed together as a single evening of theater that critics noticed the consistency and power of his comic vision.
Ives was also shocked at being compared with figures of such stature as Einstein and Joyce. "I've been reading all these reviews and critiques of my work, and being wonderfully enlightened about what these plays are actually about," he told American Theater magazine. "I thought they were just harmless little skits. . . . For me to consider what these plays are about would probably cripple me irredeemably in trying to write any more of them. You have to write innocently, up to a certain point."
Whether Ives is as "innocent" of larger thematic intentions as he claims is open to dispute. What is not in question, however, is his assertion that "I'm just trying to make good jokes." For Ives the best way to do this is through brevity. "I get terribly impatient in the theater," Ives declares. "I think most plays are too long. Most everything is too long. My tendency is to trim it really to the bone. . . . If any of [the plays in All in the Timing] were ten seconds longer it would be unbearable."
Among his longer works are the full-length plays Ancient History (1989), which he describes as a two-act "screwball tragedy," and The Red Address, a tragicomic study of transvestitism and sexual identity produced at the Magic Theater in San Francisco in 1991.
Ives has also written for television, serving as staff writer for Fox TV's Urban Anxiety. In addition, he wrote the libretto for the opera, The Secret Garden, which premiered at the Pennsylvania Opera Theater in 1991.
A humor columnist as well as a playwright, Ives's comic musings have appeared frequently in the pages of The New York Times. In one piece, he sketches out the contributions of great philosophers to the arts of cooking and eating, citing Descartes’ dictum, "I eat therefore I expand," and introducing his readers to such neglected classics as Plato's Brunch, and Aristotle's Guide to Cheap Nicomachian Restaurants.
This capacity to exploit the philosophical tradition for its comic potential would emerge most strikingly in his best-known work, All in the Timing -- an evening of six short comedies which opened at Primary Stages, a 99-seat theater in New York in December, 1993. In March of 1994 it moved to the 499-seat John Houseman Theater, located on Forty-second Street's "Theater Row." An immense success, the show was subsequently produced in major cities throughout the United States and Canada, and published in American Theater magazine as an outstanding example of contemporary American drama.
New York Times critic Vincent Canby praised All in the Timing as a collection of "sketches for some hilarious, celestially conceived review," seeing in these playlets the "density of thought and precision of poetry." The Washington Post described the show metaphorically as "Lewis Carroll meets the Marx Brothers at a party catered by James Joyce." The Post also saw Ives's work as a "verbal M.C. Escher" drawing. And Benjamin Brantley of The Times declared that "Mr. Ives's themes may owe much to the philosophical arcana of such dense thinkers as Einstein and Derrida."
For Ives such high praise came as an overwhelming surprise. He describes himself as having spent the twenty years before All in the Timing achieving, at best, modest success as a playwright. He also notes that five of the playlets had been produced individually elsewhere without eliciting much enthusiasm. (“The Universal Language” was the only new work on the bill.) It was only when all of the works were performed together as a single evening of theater that critics noticed the consistency and power of his comic vision.
Ives was also shocked at being compared with figures of such stature as Einstein and Joyce. "I've been reading all these reviews and critiques of my work, and being wonderfully enlightened about what these plays are actually about," he told American Theater magazine. "I thought they were just harmless little skits. . . . For me to consider what these plays are about would probably cripple me irredeemably in trying to write any more of them. You have to write innocently, up to a certain point."
Whether Ives is as "innocent" of larger thematic intentions as he claims is open to dispute. What is not in question, however, is his assertion that "I'm just trying to make good jokes." For Ives the best way to do this is through brevity. "I get terribly impatient in the theater," Ives declares. "I think most plays are too long. Most everything is too long. My tendency is to trim it really to the bone. . . . If any of [the plays in All in the Timing] were ten seconds longer it would be unbearable."