All in the Timing Read online

  Acclaim for

  DAVID IVES’S

  ALL IN THE TIMING

  “Pleasures that are short and smart and coarse are rare. All in the Timing is … to recent theater as a fresh, salty, offshore breeze after a humid August day.… Various names—Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Stoppard—have been mentioned in attempts to place Ives in the landscape. I think rather of two nondramatic writers: the fantastic Borges and the short prose pieces of Woody Allen. Ives, in his playpens of metaphoric time and language, seems to share their geniality.”

  —The New Criterion

  “Hilarious … brilliantly calculated.… The fragility of communication is pointed up with engaging skill … and the virtue of character.”

  —Clive Barnes, New York Post

  “David Ives is the one. I cannot recall a time when a dramatist delighted and surprised me more.… Cleverly accessible and humane … these postcards from the weirdo edge are a rare treat that only makes one wish for more.”

  —The New York Observer

  “The funniest show on Broadway or off.”

  —Stewart Klein, Channel 5—Fox TV

  “An original turn of mind is to be saluted in our theater.… Such a one is David Ives. All in the Timing, his bill of snappy one-acters, is idiosyncratic, perky, quirky, and astringent.… To Ives, language is a playground, a battleground, a testing ground.… All in the Timing is never less than funny, and sometimes a good deal more.”

  —New York

  “Delectable!”

  —Wall Street Journal

  A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, JANUARY 1995

  First Edition

  Copyright © 1989, 1990, 1992, 1994 by David Ives

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that all material in this book, being fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, the British Empire including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, is subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

  All inquiries concerning performance rights for the plays in this volume should be addressed to William Craver, Writers and Artists Agency, 19 West 44th Street, Suite 1000, New York, NY 10036.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ives, David.

  All in the timing: fourteen plays/David Ives.—1st Vintage ed., 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77261-9

  I. Title.

  PS3559.V435A82 1995

  812’.54—dc20 94-27357

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  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

  Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread

  About the Author

  Available from Vintage Books

  PREFACE

  Thank you for your very kind letter about my plays. Here are the answers to your questions:

  1. Longhand, with Bic blue medium-point pens.

  2. Mornings from 9:00 till lunch, and again in the evenings if I’m really onto something. Sure Thing got written in two successive nights between about 11:00 P.M. and 3 A.M. (and then, of course, much rewritten in rehearsal). Long Ago and Far Away took months.

  3. The South Side of Chicago.

  4. Yes.

  5. No.

  6. “Pinocchio.”

  7. Absolutely not.

  8. My aunt Jo.

  9. I was about nine or ten. I found an antiquated, bloody thriller called Mr. Strang on my parents’ bookshelves and turned its three hundred pages of mayhem into a headlong fifteen-minute play. (Obviously the short form attracted me from a tender age.) What I didn’t know at age ten was that everybody in the cast had to get a copy of the script, so after learning my lines I passed my handwritten pages on to Johnny Stanislawski down the block, and he lost them. Probably my greatest work.

  10. Ironically, my first date was with a girl whose last name was Kafka, and I took her to see The Sound of Music. God knows how that experience warped me, but several therapists have turned me down for treatment on the basis of it.

  11. Anchovies.

  12. By moistening the tip and saying, “Wankel Rotary Engine,” of course.

  13. I think Father Henkel did it. He was my English teacher in the rather peculiar, old-fashioned high school I attended (Catholic, all boys, jackets and ties, four years of Latin, the works). One particular afternoon Henkel was trying to focus our young attentions on Emily Dickinson. Unfortunately for Henkel (and Emily Dickinson) it was a warm spring day and we boys were feeling, well, boisterous. Faced with chaos, he laid the textbook down, climbed up onto his desk, and stood on his head. We all stopped horsing around and stared at him in stupefaction. Henkel then climbed back down, picked up the book, and said, “Let’s get back to ‘Beauty be not caused—it is,’ page 388.” It was probably my first glimpse of the power of the theatrical: you gather an audience, you do a headstand to get everyone’s attention, and then you’re free to explore beauty, poetry, truth, the human condition, what you will. Now that’s an education.

  14. No, I never have. Too messy.

  15. It happened right around the same time as Henkel’s head-stand. I was about sixteen and had bought a balcony ticket to see a matinee of A Delicate Balance with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. I remember sitting in the balcony that afternoon watching Hume Cronyn do the speech about the cat (in my memory, I’m sitting in the first row of the balcony staring down at the stage as if I were in the first car of a roller coaster) and thinking that there couldn’t be anyplace in the world more thrilling than where I was right then. Maybe the height just made me dizzy. Anyway, that day I started writing plays in earnest, so by the time I reached college I was already in my fertile middle period.

  16. Frankly, I don’t think it’s any of your business.

  17. When I was twenty-one, a grant got me my first professional production in a remote area of Los Angeles at America’s smallest, and possibly worst theater, in a storefront that had a pillar dead center in the middle of the stage. That play was called Canvas, and it catapulted me into immediate and total obscurity.

  18. Panty hose.

  19. Very often. In fact during my twenties I left the theater not once but twice—only to come back when I realized that nobody knew I’d left. (What are you leaving, when you “leave” the theater? It’s the kind of question a Buddhist monk answers by hitting you on the head with a plank.)

  20. Probably the production in which the actress playing the lead made her entrance on opening night and the door came off the hinges. I walked out at intermission and came back three years later.

  21. (a) Yale Drama School, and (b) not really, what with the head of the playwriting department busy digging trenches outside the cherry orchard trying to keep Sam Shepard out. Yale was a blissful time for me, in spite of the fact that there is slush on the ground in New Haven 238 days a year.

  22. The Manhattan Punch
Line Theatre, on West Forty-second Street. Much reviled then, much missed now, the Punch Line went bankrupt several years ago. Steve Kaplan, God bless him, ran it with an air of inimitable, hopeless gloom, and always found a place in his annual one-act festival for one or more of my pieces. Unpaid interns, an asthmatic Xerox machine, seething actors—it was real theater. The kind of place where the shows have to be good, because the bathrooms aren’t working.

  23. Yes.

  24. Yes.

  25. Yes I said yes I will Yes.

  26. All in the Timing was the collective title for the Primary Stages production of Sure Thing, Words, Words, Words, The Universal Language, Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread, The Philadelphia, and Variations on the Death of Trotsky. It was directed by the brilliant Jason McConnell Buzas, who also directed the premieres of several other of these plays and whose stamp (a rare Polynesian first-class airmail) is on practically every one.

  27. Mrs. Peacock, in the library, with the lead pipe.

  28. The great crested orc.

  29. Did you mean “bunion” or “onion”? The difference is, of course, crucial.

  30. Variations on the Death of Trotsky was not originally intended for production. I wrote it as a birthday gift for Fred Sanders, who directed the first production of Words, Words, Words. I had seen an article in the Times about Trotsky which mentioned that after being hit in the head with a mountain-climber’s axe, Trotsky lived on for thirty-six hours. I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard, and I got very taken with the question of what one does for thirty-six hours with a mountain-climber’s axe in one’s head. What kind of food do you eat? (Fast food, naturally.)

  31. Mere Mortals was inspired by an article in a New Jersey newspaper about a guy in an old-folks home who was trying to claim the Lindbergh baby’s inheritance. I originally intended to call the play “Perkin Warbeck,” but a rioting mob stopped me.

  32. The Philadelphia was my affectionate revenge on the City of Brotherly Love after I’d spent many miserable months there working on an opera commission and finding myself up against that town’s peculiar metaphysical, ah, peculiarities. Bakeries that didn’t have any bread on the shelves, for example. Magazine stands that didn’t sell Time magazine. Or the morning when I tried to get a cheese omelette for breakfast at a restaurant.

  Me: I’ll have a cheese omelette, please.

  Waitress: Sure, what kinda cheese you want?

  Me: What kind do you have?

  Waitress: Any kinda cheese. You name it.

  Me: Okay. I’ll have Swiss.

  Waitress: Sorry. We don’t have any Swiss.

  Me: Oh. Cheddar, then.

  Waitress: No cheddar.

  Me: Monterey jack?

  Waitress: Just ran out.

  Me: Jarlsberg … ?

  Waitress: What’s that?

  33. Yes, Sure Thing was written several years before the movie Groundhog Day, which bears it a superficial resemblance. Originally I planned to set the play at a bus stop, and I wanted to write something that would trace all the possible routes the answer to a simple question could take. As for Foreplay, I was overdosing on Glenn Gould’s recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier and had an idea for a play that worked like a fugue. Originally it was to be four secretaries at four desks with four telephones, but somehow a miniature-golf course suggested itself as richer ground.

  34. Love. What else?

  35. Oop scoopa wee-bop, bonk, deek!

  36. The Universal Language started life as a twenty-minute opera for three singers as part of a commission in dreaded Philadelphia. (Jarlsberg? What’s that?) I had long wanted to try writing a play in a language I myself made up, so the composer and I wrote several scenes and presented it in front of an audience as a work in progress. Somehow the piece didn’t work, though it was interesting enough. Years later I realized that it hadn’t worked because the music was redundant. Unamunda, the made-up language, was the music. I took the basic idea, the names of Don and Dawn, and started from scratch, with better results.

  37. Does it ever strike you that life is like a list of answers, in which you have to glean or even make up the questions yourself? Just asking.

  38. Two reams of paper, several bottles of Jim Beam, and a seemingly indestructible copy of Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers.

  39. Martha Stoberock, who keeps me reminded that the really important things in life don’t have anything to do with the theater.

  40. Lithuanian chutney.

  41. Panty hose.

  Sincerely,

  DAVID IVES

  JUNE 1994

  SURE THING

  This play is for Jason Buzas

  Sure Thing was first presented at the Manhattan Punch Line Theatre (Steve Kaplan, artistic director) in New York City in February 1988. It was directed by Jason McConnell Buzas; the set design was by Stanley A. Meyer; costume design was by Michael S. Schler; lighting design was by Joseph R. Morley. The cast was as follows:

  BILL Robert Stanton

  BETTY Nancy Opel

  BETTY, a woman in her late twenties, is reading at a café table. An empty chair is opposite her. BILL, same age, enters.

  BILL: Excuse me. Is this chair taken?

  BETTY: Excuse me?

  BILL: Is this taken?

  BETTY: Yes it is.

  BILL: Oh. Sorry.

  BETTY: Sure thing.

  (A bell rings softly.)

  BILL: Excuse me. Is this chair taken?

  BETTY: Excuse me?

  BILL: Is this taken?

  BETTY: No, but I’m expecting somebody in a minute.

  BILL: Oh. Thanks anyway.

  BETTY: Sure thing.

  (A bell rings softly.)

  BILL: Excuse me. Is this chair taken?

  BETTY: No, but I’m expecting somebody very shortly.

  BILL: Would you mind if I sit here till he or she or it comes?

  BETTY (glances at her watch): They do seem to be pretty late.…

  BILL: You never know who you might be turning down.

  BETTY: Sorry. Nice try, though.

  BILL: Sure thing.

  (Bell.)

  Is this seat taken?

  BETTY: No it’s not.

  BILL: Would you mind if I sit here?

  BETTY: Yes I would.

  BILL: Oh.

  (Bell.)

  Is this chair taken?

  BETTY: No it’s not.

  BILL: Would you mind if I sit here?

  BETTY: No. Go ahead.

  BILL: Thanks. (He sits. She continues reading.) Everyplace else seems to be taken.

  BETTY: Mm-hm.

  BILL: Great place.

  BETTY: Mm-hm.

  BILL: What’s the book?

  BETTY: I just wanted to read in quiet, if you don’t mind.

  BILL: No. Sure thing.

  (Bell.)

  BILL: Everyplace else seems to be taken.

  BETTY: Mm-hm.

  BILL: Great place for reading.

  BETTY: Yes, I like it.

  BILL: What’s the book?

  BETTY: The Sound and the Fury.

  BILL: Oh. Hemingway.

  (Bell.)

  What’s the book?

  BETTY: The Sound and the Fury.

  BILL: Oh. Faulkner.

  BETTY: Have you read it?

  BILL: Not … actually. I’ve sure read about it, though. It’s supposed to be great.

  BETTY: It is great.

  BILL: I hear it’s great. (Small pause.) Waiter?

  (Bell.)

  What’s the book?

  BETTY: The Sound and the Fury.

  BILL: Oh. Faulkner.

  BETTY: Have you read it?

  BILL: I’m a Mets fan, myself.

  (Bell.)

  BETTY: Have you read it?

  BILL: Yeah, I read it in college.

  BETTY: Where was college?

  BILL: I went to Oral Roberts Univenity.

  (Bell.)

  BETTY: Where was college?

  BILL:
I was lying. I never really went to college. I just like to party.

  (Bell.)

  BETTY: Where was college?

  BILL: Harvard.

  BETTY: Do you like Faulkner?

  BILL: I love Faulkner. I spent a whole winter reading him once.

  BETTY: I’ve just started.

  BILL: I was so excited after ten pages that I went out and bought everything else he wrote. One of the greatest reading experiences of my life. I mean, all that incredible psychological understanding. Page after page of gorgeous prose. His profound grasp of the mystery of time and human existence. The smells of the earth … What do you think?

  BETTY: I think it’s pretty boring.

  (Bell.)

  BILL: What’s the book?

  BETTY: The Sound and the Fury.

  BILL: Oh! Faulkner!

  BETTY: Do you like Faulkner?

  BILL: I love Faulkner.

  BETTY: He’s incredible.

  BILL: I spent a whole winter reading him once.

  BETTY: I was so excited after ten pages that I went out and bought everything else he wrote.

  BILL: All that incredible psychological understanding.

  BETTY: And the prose is so gorgeous.

  BILL: And the way he’s grasped the mystery of time—

  BETTY: —and human existence. I can’t believe I’ve waited this long to read him.

  BILL: You never know. You might not have liked him before.

  BETTY: That’s true.

  BILL: You might not have been ready for him. You have to hit these things at the right moment or it’s no good.

  BETTY: That’s happened to me.

  BILL: It’s all in the timing. (Small pause.) My name’s Bill, by the way.

  BETTY: I’m Betty.

  BILL: Hi.

  BETTY: Hi. (Small pause.)

  BILL: Yes I thought reading Faulkner was … a great experience.

  BETTY: Yes. (Small pause.)

  BILL: The Sound and the Fury … (Another small pause.)