David Ives - Böcker

Playwright David Ives's follow-up collection to the award-winning collection All in the Timing pushes his gift for wacky one-act comedy to new heights: two mayflies on a date realize they have only twenty-four hours to live; a washing-machine repairman falls in love with a perfect washer (should he tell his girlfriend?); an out-of-work shmo decides to spend his day being painter Edgar Degas; two Babylonian blue-collar workers have to build the Tower of Babel -- or else. Zany, thought-provoking, and always original, this anthology brings together all the one-acts from the Off-Broadway hit Mere Mortals and from the all-new Lives of the Saints, as well as several new and uncollected plays, including Bolero, Arabian Nights (which premiered at the celebrated Humana Festival in Louisville), The Green Hill, and Captive Audience.

This collection brings together four full-length plays from the same dazzling pen that produced the one-act comic masterpieces of All In The Timing:Polish Joke is about a young Polish-American's trip through ethnic stereotypes. Nine-year-old Midwesterner Jan Bogdan Sadlowski, nicknamed, Jasiu, is told by his uncle that Poles are thought to be" backward, stupid, inept, and gloomy." The only way out is for Jaisu "to impersonate someone not Polish."Don Juan In Chicago, called in which a Renaissance innocent makes a deal with the devil only to become a reluctant Latin lover.Ancient History, this comedy-drama about the holy war that breaks out when two people from two very different cultures fall in love.The Red Address, the searing portrait of a man with a secret who is forced by tragedy into self-revelation.

A young playwright, Thomas, has written an adaptation of the 1870 novel Venus in Fur by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (after whom the term “masochism” was coined); the novel is the story of an obsessive adulterous relationship between a man and the mistress to whom he becomes enslaved. At the end of a long day in which the actresses Thomas auditions fail to impress him, in walks Vanda, very late and seemingly clueless, but she convinces him to give her a chance. As they perform scenes from Thomas’s play, and Vanda the actor and Vanda the character gradually take control of the audition, the lines between writer, actor, director, and character begin to blur. Vanda is acting . . . or perhaps she sees in Thomas a masochist, one who desires fantasy in “real life” while writing fantasies for a living. An exploration of gender roles and sexuality, in which desire twists and turns in on itself, Venus in Fur is also a witty, unsettling look at the art of acting—onstage and off.

Enigmatic actress Vanda Jordan appears unannounced for an audition with director Thomas Novachek. She’s determined to land the leading role in his new production – despite seeming wrong for the part. The director is weary of auditioning a string of other actors, but agrees to see her, and is drawn quickly in to her act. As Novachek reads the lines of the male character in his play - Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the Austrian author who gave his name to masochism - it becomes a play within a play. The audience is caught between what is 'real' and what is 'acted'.Venus in Fur is an intoxicating dark comedy of desire, fantasy and the innate love of fur. An exploration of gender roles and sexuality, in which desire twists and turns in on itself, Venus in Fur is also a witty, unsettling look at the art of acting—onstage and off.Venus in Fur has been produced all over America and all over the world, and was turned into a film by Roman Polanski that premiered in Cgender annes in 2013.