All in the Timing: Fourteen Plays

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."

• Mother Night
• Time Flies and Other Short Plays
• Hamlet
• The Things They Carried
• Laugh Lines: Short Comic Plays
• Duo!: The Best Scenes for Two for the 21st Century
• Christopher Durang Volume I: 27 Short Plays
• The Colored Museum
• Contemporary Scenes for Student Actors
• The Actor's Book of Contemporary Stage Monologues: More Than 150 Monologues from More Than 70 Playwrights