David Ives

His play, Is He Dead? adapted from an "unproduced 1898 comedy" by Mark Twain, ran on Broadway from December 2007 to March 2008.

David Ives (born July 11, 1950) is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist.

He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1971.

He traveled to Germany, where he taught English.

His play, Canvas, was produced in California in 1972, and then at Circle Repertory Company in New York City.

In New York Ives worked as an editor for William P. Bundy, the editor at Foreign Affairs magazine.

Ives wrote three full-length plays: St. Freud (1975), The Lives and Deaths of the Great Harry Houdini, and City of God.

In 1983 Ives was playwright-in-residence at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts where The Lives and Deaths of the Great Harry Houdini was produced.

Ives graduated from the Yale School of Drama with a Master of Fine Arts in 1984.

In 1987 his short play Words, Words, Words was presented at the Manhattan Punch Line Theatre, followed by Sure Thing, Variations on the Death of Trotsky, Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread (1990), and The Universal Language.

A two-act play, Ancient History was produced Off-Broadway in 1989 by Primary Stages.

In the mid-1990s, Ives contributed pieces to Spy Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker.

New York magazine named him one of the "100 Smartest New Yorkers".

When asked by the magazine to comment on being so listed for the same issue, Ives’ response began, "Grocery lists. Spelling lists. Laundry lists. The very idea of lists has something inherently narrow, petty, unpoetic about it. "List, list, O list!" cried Hamlet’s father's ghost in exasperation, and I couldn't agree more..."

Ives' All in the Timing, an evening of six one-act plays, premiered at Primary Stages in 1993, moved to the larger John Houseman Theatre, and ran for 606 performances.

In a review The New York Times said "there is indeed a real heart ... There is sustenance as well as pure entertainment."

Critic Vincent Canby wrote, "Ives [is] wizardly ... magical and funny ... a master of language. He uses words for their meanings, sounds and associations, spinning conceits of a sort I’ve not seen or heard before. He’s an original."

It won the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award for Playwriting, was included in Best Plays of 1993 — 1994, and in 1995 — 1996 was the most performed play in the country after William Shakespeare’s plays.

Ives’ full-length play, Don Juan in Chicago, premiered off-Broadway in New York at Primary Stages, on March 25, 1995.

The Blizzard is a short play that was written as part of a theatrical concept that began in 1995 on the lower East Side of Manhattan, in which a group of writers, actors and directors would gather together to create a play from scratch, rehearse it, and perform it — all within 24 hours.

The Blizzard, and eight of Ives' other short plays, was produced on the radio by Playing On Air, directed by John Rando and starred Jesse Eisenberg.

He is perhaps best known for his comic one-act plays; The New York Times in 1997 referred to him as the "maestro of the short form".

The Red Address, a full-length drama, premiered in New York at Second Stage Theater in January 1997.

An evening of one-act plays, Mere Mortals and Others, opened off-Broadway at Primary Stages in New York, May 13, 1997.

Peter Marks of The New York Times described it as "a collection of six fast and ferociously funny comedies ... a madcap evening of one-acts", and noted that Ives has the "gratifying ability to unharness the intoxicating power of language and at the same time entertain."

Polish Joke, a full-length play, has been described as loosely autobiographical.

It premiered in the summer of 2001 at the Contemporary Theatre of Seattle, and then opened in New York at the Manhattan Theatre Club in February 2003, in the cast in New York was Walter Bobbie, who would later be the director of Venus in Fur.

His translation of Georges Feydeau's farce A Flea in Her Ear was produced at Chicago Shakespeare in 2006, and won the Joseph Jefferson Award for "new adaptation".

New Jerusalem, concerning the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza, opened Off-Broadway in January 2008 (previews from December 2007) in a Classic Stage Company production.

Primary Stages presented a revival of All in the Timing in January 2013.

This new production was directed by John Rando.

His plays have been published in the anthologies All in the Timing, Time Flies, and Polish Joke And Other Plays.

Ives has also written dramatic plays, narrative stories, and screenplays, has adapted French 17th and 18th-century classical comedies, and adapted 33 musicals for New York City's Encores! series.

Ives wrote his first play when he was nine.

He attended a boys Catholic seminary.

"We would-be priests were groomed for gravitas," he has said.

At the end of the year the seniors could be a part of a school show called "The Senior Mock," in which the students satirized the teachers.

Ives played the role of "the chain-smoking English teacher who coached the track team (while smoking)", and he wrote and performed a song.

This school experience, along with seeing a production of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, starring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, were two early events that inspired his interest in theatre.

Ives attended Northwestern University, majoring in English.