David Ives (born David Roszkowski July 11, 1950) is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. 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". 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.
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Early life and education
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. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1971. He traveled to Germany, where he taught English. Ives graduated from the Yale School of Drama with a Master of Fine Arts in 1984.
Theater
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.
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.
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 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.
Musical theatre
In the early 1990s Ives started working in musical theatre, writing the libretto for an opera based on Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (music by Greg Pliska). It premiered in Philadelphia in 1991 at the Pennsylvania Opera Theater.
He then became a regular adapter for the New York City Center Encores! series of American musicals in concert, starting with Out Of This World in 1995, Du Barry Was A Lady in 1996, and working on two or three a year until 2012. As of 2013, Ives ended his writing for Encores!, saying "I've very happily done 33 adaptations for Encores! But there comes a time when it's time for someone else to have that pleasure, especially given how full my platter is these days." His Encores! adaptation of Wonderful Town moved to Broadway's Al Hirschfeld Theatre in 2003, directed by Kathleen Marshall.
He adapted David Copperfield's magic show, Dreams and Nightmares, which premiered on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre in December 1996. He also adapted Cole Porter's Jubilee (1998) and Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific (with Reba McEntire) for concert performances at Carnegie Hall, as well as My Fair Lady for a staged concert at Avery Fisher Hall in New York in 2007.
He helped to rework the book for the Broadway version of the musical Dance of the Vampires, with book, music and lyrics by Jim Steinman and original German book and lyrics by Michael Kunze. The musical opened on Broadway in October 2002 in previews, and closed in January 2003 after 56 performances. He co-wrote the book for Irving Berlin's White Christmas, which premiered in San Francisco in 2004 and then went on to tour across the United States. It had a limited engagement on Broadway from November 2008 to January 2009, and also from November 2009 to January 2010.
Ives began collaborating with Stephen Sondheim on a new untitled musical based on two films by Luis Buñuel, initially set to premiere in 2017. Development on the show faltered, but during a September 15, 2021 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Sondheim announced he was working on a new musical called Square One in collaboration with David Ives. Nathan Lane and Bernadette Peters were involved in a reading of the new work. Renamed as Here We Are, the musical collaboration inspired by The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel would have a limited engagement world premiere in September 2023, running through January 2024 at The Shed.
Narrative fiction
Ives wrote The Phobia Clinic, a full-length narrative verse-novel published in 2010. It is described as a philosophical horror novel written in verse. It is, according to the author, "grotesque, satirical, personal, sometimes funny, but mostly reflecting the mood of the title." Inspired by Dante, The Phobia Clinic employs the verse form of the Divine Comedy, known as terza rima, with the lines grouped in threes, and each group, or tercet, following the rhyme scheme ABA BCB CDC DED throughout Ives' 55 cantos.
Ives wrote a young adult book, Monsieur Eek, which was released in 2001. The book is set in 1609, and is a "fairy tale–like story full of absurd characters who make bizarre interpretations ..." His next book was Scrib (2005), set in the American West in 1863. His book Voss: How I Come to America and Am Hero, Mostly, was released in 2008.
Personal
Ives lives in New York City with his wife, Martha Ives, a book illustrator, a linoprint artist and a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists.
Works
Plays
1972 Canvas
1975 Saint Freud
1976 Boarders
1977 The Conversation
1981 Inner Station
1982 Dark Horse
1983 The Lives and Deaths of the Great Harry Houdini
1983 Polly
198? City of God
1988 The Land of Cockaigne
1989 Ancient History (later revised in 1996)
1993 All in the Timing (six short plays)
1995 Don Juan In Chicago
1997 The Red Address
1997 Mere Mortals and Others (six short plays)
1999 Lives of the Saints (five short plays)
2003 Polish Joke
2005 Roll Over, Beethoven (a short comedy)
2008 New Jerusalem (The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656)
2010 Venus In Fur
2018 The Panties, The Partner, and the One Percent: Scenes from the Heroic Life of the Middle Class (inspired by the work of Carl Sternheim)
202? The Transformations
Operas
1987 The Universal Language
1987 Pitcher Perfect (Unfinished, music by Catherine Reid)
1991 The Secret Garden (libretto of an opera based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, with music by Greg Pliska)
Musicals
1997 Make Someone Happy (co-written with Phyllis Newman)
2002 Dance of the Vampires (co-author of the revised 2002 Broadway production)
2004 Irving Berlin's White Christmas (co-authored with Paul Blake)
2023 Here We Are (music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim)
Translations
2006 Georges Feydeau's farce A Flea In Her Ear
2007 Yasmina Reza's play A Spanish Play
Adaptations
Note: David Ives also helped mount 33 Encores! Series adaptations between 1995-2013.
1996 Dreams and Nightmares (adapted from David Copperfield's magic show)
2007 Is He Dead? (adapted from an unproduced 1898 comedy by Mark Twain)
2010 The Liar (adapted from Pierre Corneille's comedy Le Menteur)
2011 The School for Lies (adapted from Molière's The Misanthrope)
2011 The Heir Apparent (adapted from Jean-Francois Regnard's Le Legataire Universel)
2018 The Metromaniacs (a "translaptation" of a rediscovered French farce by Alexis Piron titled La Métromanie)
Screenplays
1998 The Hunted (co-written with Bennett Cohen, produced for Trilogy Productions and airing on Showtime)
2013 La Vénus à la Fourrure (directed by and co-authored with Roman Polanski)
Television
1998 The Pentagon Wars (uncredited rewrites)
1998 Remember WENN (Episode 55 – "The Sunset Also Rises")
1990 Urban Anxiety (staff writer)
Narrative Fiction
2001 Monsieur Eek
2005 Scrib
2008 Voss: How I Come to America and Am Hero, Mostly
Published Poetry
2009 The Phobia Clinic
2018 Advice to the Creator
2018 Three Riddles
2023 A Pair of Glasses
Short Play Collections
Note: Plays in bold are published here for the very first time. Years listed are the date of their debut.