All in the Timing
David Ives is a clockwork playwright. He’s fond of bells. They go “ding” in his plays for dramatic effect. He is enamored of clocks. They go “ticktock, ticktock” between his scenes. Like Philip Glass, he is more mechanic than artist. His words ignite his jokes, which lubricate the motors of his plots.
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Ives is quite clever when he mocks composer-hypnotist Glass, as he does in one of the six short plays that make up All in the Timing, but his writing technique is not all that different from the approach taken by this occasionally brilliant but migraine-inducing composer of dizzyingly repetitious music. Like Glass, whose minimal variations make Gandhi’s life indistinguishable from that of a Texas death-row inmate or a mythical character in a Cocteau film, Ives employs rote systems of cadences, whether of jokes or motifs, that render the plight of a Russian revolutionary indistinguishable from that of a pair of New Yorkers on a first date.
More than any of his other pieces here, “The Universal Language” reveals Ives’s true talent and potential. A shy, stuttering young woman overcomes her disability with the help of a charlatan language teacher, who instructs her in a wonderfully absurd new language called “Unamunda.” Brilliantly concocted by Ives as a pastiche of French, German, English, Spanish, and the names of pop celebrities and consumer products, it is so ingenious it’s scary. And the way he develops the relationships of the main characters (superbly played by Kristen Swanson and Joe Dempsey) using this gibberish is nothing short of astounding. Ding, ding, ding!
