If you like Scrabble, you’re the target audience for “All in the Timing.”
David Ives writes not so much plays but puzzle-plays. Depending on your sensibilities, he’s either a delightful literary anarchist or master of the one-note gimmick.
“All in the Timing,” opening Modern Muse’s third season at the Bug Theatre, consists of six pun-laden, existential playlets that aren’t much more than comic word games stuffed with rhymes and tongue-twisting malapropisms.
Oops, I just plagiarized myself. That was actually my description of a 2003 local production of Ives’ “Lives of the Saints.” But these may as well be companion pieces, this one focusing on the limitations of language and the inadvertent virtues of randomness. Ives calls his writing “literary ventriloquism.”
In the opening (and best) scene, two strangers (Jeremy Make and Susan Scott) share a table at a crowded cafe. Conversations like these happen every day, but rarely end with soul mates connecting. More often, they end with coffee-tossing or … something in between, because one blurted interjection might torpedo the course of the interchange. This woman, for example, might react far differently to hearing that this man graduated from Harvard than to hearing he recently had a nervous breakdown.
As these two navigate this minefield, an offstage bell regularly interrupts their rapid-fire conversation, allowing the character to posit an alternative line of dialogue to the one just given, to fix gaffes and stay the course. It’s like a Drew Carey improv game – only scripted. It’s sketch comedy for English majors. Witty theater for the Cranium set.
The pieces are all performed with high spirit and great competence, but the premises are limited and offer little overall intellectual payoff for the audience. Consider the “Twilight Zone” vortex in which a man in a diner learns he will only get what he wants if he asks for the opposite. You want a Bud? Then ask for an O.J. OK, that’s funny, but … so?
One skit has three lab-rat chimps (Scott, Missy Moore and Jennifer Anne Forsyth) locked in a room with typewriters: Given years, researchers want to prove, one will eventually, randomly, type “Hamlet.” In another parodying the Esperanto language phenomenon, an eccentric (Josh Hartwell) teaches a stuttering housewife (Forsyth) how to speak Unamunda, his language of pop-culture gibberish. He wants to unite all the people of the world with a “universal language” – that only these two understand.
Cumulatively, “Timing” is a mildly amusing “comedy of ideas,” but those ideas are pretty thin and overwritten, often giving way to tedium.
This is really just actors playing actor games – and that’s a great real pleasure for the audience, because the actors gathered by directors Stephen J. Lavezza and Gabriella Cavallerro are quite adept at it. Hartwell excels in “Variations on the Death of Trotsky,” which shows the Russian revolutionary with a mountain climber’s ax embedded in his skull, reading future accounts of his demise that very day. Forsyth does a great chimp monologue during which she recites (with great verve), nothing but the letter K. All five actors have moments to shine.
It’s ironic that in a contemporary sketch comedy about the ineffectiveness of modern communication, Ives doesn’t quite communicate his overall point effectively. He penned “All in the Timing” in 1994, just before the Internet explosion, but I’m guessing he’d likely say technological advances have only widened the divide between people and honest human connection.
Ives also wrote the hideous “Polish Joke” that was presented last year by the Denver Rep, and he co-wrote the book for the “White Christmas” that bows this December at the Buell Theatre.
And he very nearly wrote the book for “The Little Mermaid,” currently bowing in Denver. He penned the first version in 2002, before he and director Matthew Bourne were bounced in favor of a new creative team. One can only imagine what kind of bizarre gimmicks Ives might have come up with for that:
“So this mermaid falls in love with a human face … while the human falls in love with a disembodied voice. Only that voice? It can’t talk.” Go!
Hey, wait a minute. …
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“All in the Timing” | ** 1/2 RATING
COMEDY SKETCHES | Presented by Modern Muse | Written by David Ives | Starring Susan Scott, Jeremy Make, Jennifer Anne Forsyth, Josh Hartwell and Missy Moore | At the Bug Theatre, 3654 Navajo St. | THROUGH SEPT. 16 | 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays | 1 hour, 50 minutes | $20 | 303-780-7836 or
