As I was reading David Ives...

Theater, besides being a good outlet for me to release extra energy, is a nice way to refresh my mind between books, and keep my mind clear of other novels while I wait for a chance to blog about the most recent one I read. So after finishing Stephen King, I picked up a collection of David Ives plays that my voice teacher lent me.

Time Flies is the successor to All in the Timing, David Ives's previous collection, which contained such famous one-act comedies as Sure Thing and Variations on the Death of Trotsky. Those two plays alone should be enough to cement Ives's position as a classic of modern theater. In Time Flies, Ives presents us with thirteen additional quirky plays from two productions. They feature two mayflies, the construction workers for the Tower of Babel, a man who decides to be Degas for a day (Edward or Edgar?), a mechanic in love with his washing machine, a faulty interpreter, and a bunch of others.

All analysis has to be thrown out the window when you read these. I expect a few bits are better seen onstage, but Ives's writing is witty enough to read well on the page, too. I was put off by the fact that his endings rarely make sense, but pay them no mind-- the gold is in the situations, here. "Babel's in Arms" had me laughing out loud the most, but "Arabian Nights" (with a joking interpreter) is touching, and "Captive Audience" is excellent (in which two characters are transfixed and influenced by a television, reminding me of a sketch from Twilight Zone: The Movie). A lot of them are simply weird-- "Time Flies", about the aforemenetioned mayflies, is not your ordinary one-act, and "Enigma Varations" is a duplicated play that's terribly hard to follow on the page but also brilliant in staging its parallel universes. There is sex and cursing here, oh yes-- Ives claims to be influenced by David Mamet, who "knows that when men go to the theater, they want to hear familiar words", in the word of Ives's characters. The touchier elements are used to great effect-- before the word "lever", construction workers used the term "that fucker"-- and while the sex gets overwhelming, I loved "The Mystery at Twicknam Vicarage", whose victim has been in bed with literally everything and everyone in the room.

Some I still haven't grasped. "Lives of the Saints" is weird, with two women preparing a funeral dinner in a pantomime kitchen. So is "Bolero", where two hotel guests try to figure out what's going on next door, until the police come and... a building falls? Huh? And "Speed-the-Play", a parody of David Mamet's works, blew over my head since I'm not familiar with the man. Others, though, are good despite their weirdness. "Soap Opera" is about a mechanic in love with his washing machine, for crying out loud! Yet it's downright hilarious! Who would think to combine a weird child's fantasies with literal soap opera?

The only one I haven't mentioned, "Dr. Fritz, or: The Forces of Light" is due to be produced at my school's next collection of one act plays. I would have picked one of the others, but hey, these are supposed to translate better on the stage, anyway. Any Ives on stage is good enough for me-- I might be in love with a book. Is that any worse than being in love with a washing machine?