The world according to David Ives is a very add place, and his plays constitute a virtual stress test of the
English language--and of the audience's capacity for disorientation and delight. Ives's characters plunge into
black holes called "Philadelphias," where the simplest desires are hilariously thwarted. Chimps named
Milton, Swift, and Kafka are locked in a room and made to re-create Hamlet. And a con man peddles courses in a
dubious language in which "hello" translates as "velcro" and "fraud" comes out as
"freud."
At once enchanting and perplexing, incisively intelligent and side-splittingly funny, this original paperback edition
of Ives's plays includes "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," and
"Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread."