>> HASKINS: Coming up on "Theater Talk"... >> IVES: Every play needs work. You know, a play I wrote last week needs work because the shelf life of a play is two weeks, you know. It's about the same as a box of cereal. >> HASKINS: "Theater Talk" is made possible in part by... ♪♪ From New York City, this is "Theater Talk." I'm Susan Haskins. Michael Riedel is out on the road somewhere, and I am delighted to be joined by Jesse Green, drama critic of New York Magazine, to introduce one of the theater's most prolific and eminent playwrights, David Ives. David has a new comedy opening -- "The Liar," an adaptation of a play by Corneille. It's opening at CSC, and it's running right now. >> GREEN: Before we get to that and all of your eminent and varied activities, I just want to read to you from your Wikipedia page. May I? >> IVES: Oh, my God. >> GREEN: Was it written, by the way, by an absurdist playwright? Do you know who wrote it? >> IVES: I never look at -- >> GREEN: "Ives grew up in a neighborhood of Sesame Street," is how it starts. >> IVES: Really? >> GREEN: Yes. >> IVES: Wow. >> GREEN: Is that true, David Ives? >> IVES: Uh, no. I grew up in the steel mills of South Chicago, actually. How bizarre. You know, my wife once read my Wikipedia page, and it ended with -- >> GREEN: It does. >> IVES: "He lives in New York City with his Jewish wife, Martha." >> GREEN: Oh, no. It no longer says that. >> IVES: It no longer says that. >> GREEN: It now says, "Ives lives in New York City with his husband, James Ives, a book illustrator and a linoprint artist." >> HASKINS: Are you kidding? >> GREEN: I'm not kidding. I just printed this today, and I brought it here especially to confuse you. >> IVES: Fake news is everywhere. I blame Donald Trump. >> GREEN: Exactly. He tweeted it to Wikipedia. >> IVES: Or his national security adviser, who's been spreading fake rumors about me all the time. >> GREEN: Well, now that we've got that out of the way, both things are untrue. >> IVES: Yeah. Both things are untrue. >> GREEN: Are you in fact a playwright? >> IVES: I am in fact a playwright. >> GREEN: What kind of playwright are you? And this is the core of what I really want to get to. Let's go over some of what you've done. You first became well known in New York for short plays. >> IVES: Mm-hmm. >> GREEN: Often absurdist, comic. You've done musical adaptations. You've done kind of classic works in adaptation, but more than just slight adaptations, often. >> IVES: "Translaptations," I call them. >> GREEN: [ Laughs ] You've done full-length original plays. >> IVES: Yeah. >> GREEN: And other things I can't think of right now. How do you categorize yourself? >> IVES: That's a very good question because, you know, unfortunately, I have decided that I never want to do the same thing twice, which is not a good career move. For any young playwrights out there, I just want to say that is... Don't do that. It's like, don't, you know... You must stay in your brand, and I don't really have a brand just because I'm easily bored or something, but I just don't like to repeat myself. In fact, when I start writing something and I realize that it's a little too similar to something I've done before, I just stop and put it away or... So, I really can't characterize myself. I like variety. >> HASKINS: One of your most successful plays, "Venus in Fur," which was to me very atypical of what I knew of your work before, and it won you many awards, and Roman Polanski made a film of it -- >> Did win me any awards? I don't think -- >> HASKINS: It won... Well, it was up for the award. >> GREEN: Nina Arianda -- >> HASKINS: Oh, yeah, well, she sort of took off with that, didn't she? >> IVES: I believe my statue is on her mantel. [ Laughter ] >> GREEN: So, if you don't categorize yourself, is there an area of interest that's greater than some other? Or does it all interest you equally? >> IVES: No, it's... You know, I totally work on impulse and inspiration, so, you know, you also have to know... Maybe there are playwrights who think that way, but I never worry about that. My only concern is to sit down in the morning at my writing table and write something. So it has to be something new. Presumably, it has to be something different from what other people are doing -- another career move I do not recommend. And so I just... I get an idea, and I may sit on it for years, as I did with some of those short plays, and then wrote them. Or it may be an idea that I get today and I sit down and write tomorrow morning. So, if I were to spend time thinking about my career, I would never write. And so it's really my only concern -- I mean, the page is the only interesting and important part of my day. >> HASKINS: So, do you get up at the same time every morning and go to write for the same period of time? >> IVES: I do. I do. I've been doing it for years. My schedule has changed, but I always get up and... I always go to work at the same time. I work till the middle of the afternoon, and then I take a walk and think about what I wrote, and rewrite in my head. Then I go home and touch it up. >> GREEN: Say hello to your husband, James Ives. [ Laughter ] >> IVES: James Ives. I have to tell Martha about this. >> GREEN: She didn't know she was in a polyamorous marriage. >> IVES: She hasn't noticed him. She hasn't noticed him, anyway. >> HASKINS: But you told me -- >> IVES: I mean, the apartment's pretty big, but it's not that big. >> HASKINS: You told me that before you hit it as a playwright, you would get jobs as a typist because you type so remarkably fast. >> IVES: Yeah. I was a temp typist for a long time. But I write longhand. >> HASKINS: Right. >> IVES: I write my plays longhand, so it doesn't matter that I'm a fast typist. >> HASKINS: You write many adaptations of Encores! musicals. You've stopped now, but you did 33, correct? >> IVES: I did 33 of those -- >> HASKINS: Did you write those in longhand? >> IVES: Oh, yes, of course. Because really, the Encores! series for me was an editing job. It was a rewrite job in many ways, but no, I used to look forward so much to sitting down -- they would send me a script, and I would sit down with it, and I would read it over a few times, and I would start marking, and then I would start cutting, and then I would start marking where it needed transitional material or new material or a better joke. And so it would be the course of three or four days of just sitting and reworking it, and then I would sit at my computer, and I would type the whole thing over again because typing what I had not written, typing Oscar Hammerstein's dialogue, was a way of getting into the dialogue because it was an act of sort of literary ventriloquism. You know, I had to think what the original book writer, whether it was Hammerstein or somebody else, wanted. And so you have to... What that means is that gets you into the voices of the characters and the mood of the piece, you know. It's different working on "DuBarry Was a Lady" and working on "Juno" and working on "Strike Up the Band." And so you have to get into that voice, and it was great fun, and then it was less fun just because I'd done it too many times. And I don't like to do things that don't... that aren't fun. And so I stopped. >> GREEN: You mentioned earlier the pleasure of the new project, of the new page. >> IVES: Yeah. >> GREEN: On the other hand, you are well known for these adaptations, not just of Encores!, but of classic drama. >> IVES: Yeah. >> GREEN: And I wonder, when you sit down to write an adaptation of a classic drama, first of all, are you assigned this by a theater company and asked... Do they ask you, "Would you like to do this adaptation?" Or do you read a lot of classic drama and say, "I can do that one better"? >> IVES: You know, it differs. I now have this reputation as a French translator, you know, as a translator of French plays, and to tell you the truth, my knowledge of French is a year and a half at Northwestern with a very beautiful French teacher, a month in Paris with a girlfriend, and a brush-up, you know, a brush-up course in a book. And so I'm very good at 17th-century French. If you ask me how to say, "I've got to run to the corner and pick up a cup of coffee," I would have no idea how to say that. But -- >> GREEN: But if you want to say, "I'm in love with the maid"? >> IVES: I know how to say that. I know how to say that. But I know how to say it in iambic pentameter. >> GREEN: Or hexameters even? >> IVES: Well, they use alexand-- You know, they use... But I use iambic pentameter. >> HASKINS: So, now, what has inspired this production of "The Liar"? >> IVES: Yes, "The Liar." To get back to your question about where these come from, "The Liar" -- I had done an adaptation of "A Flea in Her Ear" for Chicago Shakespeare because Gary Griffin wanted a new version of it, and so I did that. And so that was how I relearned my French. I wanted to work from the original French. I did not want to do this thing where you get everybody else's translation and you collate it and call it yours. I really wanted to play-write. So I read it in French and brushed up my French that way, and I had a great time doing that. Then Classic Stage asked me to do... They thought I could translate French, so they got me to do a translation of a Yasmina Reza play called "A Spanish Play," which John Turturro directed. It had Zoe Caldwell. It was a great production. And then my career is growing as a French translator, and so Michael Kahn of Washington Shakespeare sent me "The Liar" because he wanted to do that play -- there was an existing translation that presumably wasn't very good -- and he said, "Would you read this play?" And I read this play, and I just fell in love with it. You know, I read it over the course of a couple of days, and it was as if somebody had sent me "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in French and nobody knew that it existed -- because it is... It's 1643. It was Pierre Corneille's return to comedy in the middle of his career, when he was a tragic, you know, playwright of great note and was a huge success then. And I can see why. It is this gossamer play that has... The entire plot is this -- A young man comes to Paris who is a pathological liar. He falls in love with a girl whom he thinks is named Clarice, but she's actually named Lucrece. And that's the whole plot. And so it spins all of these changes on that. And I so loved it, I immediately said, "Yes," you know, "I have to do this play" -- which presented the question of how to do it because of course it's in French verse. It's in couplets, as French classical comedy was. And so I could have written it in prose, in which case it would have sounded like a really bad Alan Ayckbourn play. You know? And... There's no such thing as a bad Alan Ayckbourn play. >> HASKINS: To clear that up. >> IVES: Just to clear that up. >> GREEN: Out of 79 plays, there's not one really bad Alan Ayckbourn play? >> IVES: There are no bad Alan Ayckbourn plays. But in prose, it just would have been flattened. And so I thought, "This is a play about a young man who lies like a virtuoso" because it's full of these page-long speeches, which are these gorgeous lies. Because anytime anybody asks him something, he just starts to weave this story. >> HASKINS: Is he sympathetic? >> IVES: Oh, yes. He's wonderful. He's charming, and -- >> GREEN: He's that common thing in life, the delightful liar. >> IVES: He's a delightful liar, but... And he doesn't get his comeuppance or anything. He just... And so I thought, "This has to be... It has to be in verse because it's a play about an artist" because he is creating his world at every second and causing immense complications to which he pays no attention. >> GREEN: All right. But so you sit down -- you've decided you're going to do it in verse. >> IVES: And I've never done verse before. So I have to learn how to do that. >> GREEN: So, to do that, do you read translations in verse? Did you read the... Richard Wilbur is the famous translation -- >> Yeah, you know, I am not a fan of Richard Wilbur's translations very much, as good as they are, partly because I'm not a fan of Molière. You know, I have to get it out there. I'm not a fan of Molière. >> GREEN: [ Hisses ] >> HASKINS: And why not? >> GREEN: I'm sorry. You have to leave now. >> IVES: Because Molière never tells me anything I don't know. Because the jokes are creaky and ancient. And also because Molière's point of view is a medieval point of view. You know, he was writing in 1660, more or less. Shakespeare had already happened. The Renaissance had happened. And you would never know it from Molière's plays. Because the lazzi are out of commedia dell'arte, which is the Middle Ages, and the people are one thing. You know, it's as if the French had not learned that people change and that a play is about transformation of character. And so Molière's plays all stay there for me. That's what I loved about the Corneille play because it is an improvisation. It's like this rhapsody on a liar. >> HASKINS: But does he change? Not to give anything away. >> IVES: He changes everything around him -- unlike those Molière comedies, where if you're a miser at the beginning, you stay a miser, if you're the cranky father, you stay the cranky father. And so this is a play that has this really beautiful, subtle movement -- and music. And so I had to learn how to write in verse, and so basically, what I did was, no, I did not go back to Wilbur. What I did was, every morning before I started work, I read two sonnets of Shakespeare out loud to myself, and I looked at how he took iambic pentameter and made it move -- because, you know, he was good. And then I would start... When I had done that, I started reading "As You Like It" and "Twelfth Night" aloud to myself because that verse is so fluid. And that's what I wanted. I wanted fluid iambic pentameter. And so while I was doing that, I was reading the play over and over and over again and making notes on what had to change and how to make it better. >> GREEN: Let me interrupt you there. "Making notes on what had to change." I'm not challenging that, but I'm curious. Going in as a 21st-century playwright to a classic work of French literature and saying, "Oh, here's something that needs to change" -- What is that like? How do you justify that? >> IVES: Classic, unknown work of -- >> GREEN: Does that make it more open to -- >> IVES: No, but you know what? These plays -- I also adapted "The Misanthrope," you know, for a classic stage, which Walter Bobbie did a brilliant production of. But, yes, these plays must change, because every play needs work. You know, a play I wrote last week needs work, because the shelf life of a play is two weeks, you know? It's about the same as a box of cereal, you know? [ Both chuckle ] And so it's one of the great challenges of being a playwright that what plays are trying to do is so elusive that if you look at the history of music -- Look at music over the last 200 years. There are thousands of pieces that are worth playing and hearing. Look at the whole history of drama, and the number of plays that are still worth seeing is tiny. Why is that? It's because there is something that is so fragile about plays that, you know, plays we loved 10 years ago, have you seen those lately? You know, not so much. >> GREEN: So you're not talking so much about correcting errors in the construction. >> IVES: I'm talking about making them better, because -- >> GREEN: For our time. >> IVES: No, not for our time, making them better as a play. >> GREEN: Well, will your version, then, be good forever? >> IVES: For example -- And by the way, I changed the play so much that it is listed as "by David Ives, adapted from Corneille." But here's a good example. In the original Corneille, the part of Lucrece must have been the girl that Corneille was sleeping with, because she has about five lines and was obviously meant to just be beautiful. And if you're gonna have a love story, as we know from Shakespeare, you know, everybody's got to have a part. And this is a play with eight people in it, seven people in it, so everybody's got to be interesting. And so I took her, and I gave her moments that are not in Corneille, because I had to make her a person. She was not a person. And that is so often true not only of French classical comedy and Molière, it was true in encores. You know, you go to those plays from 1931, they are made of tissue paper, and you've got to -- >> GREEN: Well, the librettos of 1930s musicals are a different category, shall we say. >> IVES: But the 1950s musicals I worked on were just the same way. They needed help, you know? And so you've got to work as a playwright. And that's what I do, is that I go back to these French plays. I've done four French classical comedies by now. And you have to ask what was on Corneille's chest? What is he trying to do here? >> GREEN: Aside from the actress playing Lucrece. >> IVES: What was Molière ticked off about in "The Misanthrope"? And how does that inform the plot of "The Misanthrope," not just kind of jokes about, you know, the court of Louis XIV. They're not interesting. So you have to create a play for today, because I'm a total opponent of museum theater in any form. There is no reason to do a play if it's not a good play. And if there is a part of the play that doesn't work, it must be cut, or it must be changed. It's absurd. >> GREEN: Would you take on an assignment to adapt one of the greatest comedies ever written, say "As You Like It" or "Midsummer Night's Dream" or something like that? >> IVES: No, because Shakespeare's a little different. I think you can cut Shakespeare. You know, you can take some of those words that we don't know what they mean anymore, and substitute a word here and there. Those plays work very well cut. We've seen "As You Like It." We've seen "Twelfth Night." They're gorgeous. Those are gorgeous plays. We also can't forget that Shakespeare was a man of the Renaissance in a way that these plays are not. French classical comedies are classical comedies. They're built on types. And we don't think in types anymore. They're built on old jokes. And we have to brush up some of those jokes. >> GREEN: Shakespeare's closer to us. >> IVES: Shakespeare is us. That's why Shakespeare is Shakespeare, because he understood us, you know? We love "Hamlet" because he is everything we've ever felt, you know, as a lost human being who's trying to cope with death, old girlfriend, bad mom, you know, uncle getting in your way, inheritance. You know, that play covers every subject in the world. And so that's why we love him. And there's a reason why French classical comedy has never been popular over here, because it's just too rigid, and it's very thin. And I have to thicken, you know, those play a bit and also make better jokes. >> HASKINS: Do you look back on, for example, one of your most successful plays, "Venus in Fur," and do you think that you still need to work on that if you were to print it again? >> IVES: Oh, yeah. I think that's true of many plays, but "Venus" in particular, and for a very strange reason, which you and I were talking about before the air, which is that, you know, I write my plays longhand. And I just love to attack the page with a pen. And in the case of "Venus in Fur," I wrote certain parts of that on the computer. And every time I hear that play, I hear the parts that were written on the computer, because it's just like we're in Technicolor, and suddenly, we're in black and white, you know, and it looks like Kansas, you know, not the pretty parts of Kansas. >> HASKINS: And I said to you, is it because writing on the computer is faster? >> IVES: Yes, because it makes you glib. You know, when I was teaching at NYU a few, you know, 20 years ago, kids were writing plays on the computer, and you can hear it. You can hear that it's being rattled off. And plays are about investigating character. They're not about flashy dialogue. >> HASKINS: Right. >> IVES: And that's part of the seduction, for example, of David Mamet, who writes wonderful music, and -- But, you know, for me, plays are investigations of character. And so, I would tell my students, "Take this scene, and take a pen, and sit down, and just write this scene out with your pen and see if something comes to you while you're writing," because it slows you down, and you have to consider every word. If you're gonna take the trouble to write that word, you have to think about it, and you have to hear it. You hear it in your mind in a way differently from the clacking of the keyboard. So, you know, I would use a quill if I could. [ All chuckle ] And I would use a dull quill so that I had to sharpen it. >> GREEN: That's an excellent place for a segue. Let's talk about your next project, a musical that you've been working on with Stephen Sondheim, who famously writes with Blackwing pencils for much the same -- Well, I don't know if it's the same reason. He says that they are so soft that they require him to get up from the sofa constantly to sharpen them. >> IVES: He loves them. And they're hard to get these days. I think one of his producers sent him a case of Blackwing pencils so he could never run out. >> HASKINS: Well, he's made them popular. >> IVES: [ Chuckles ] That's why they're running out. >> HASKINS: Right, but they have to fix the eraser. That's a problem. >> IVES: But he writes lying down, and I write sitting up. And so, there you have it. >> GREEN: In the same room? Do you ever write together? What's your method? >> IVES: Of Sondheim and I? >> HASKINS: Well, say what they're doing. >> GREEN: Oh, yes. So, we should say that you and Stephen Sondheim are working on a new musical based on two movies by Luis Buñuel. >> IVES: Right >> GREEN: Title still to be determined? >> IVES: Yes, we don't have a title. But it's based on "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "The Exterminating Angel." And, so, Act 1 is a group of people trying to find dinner. And Act 2 is those people finding dinner and getting locked in a room together -- just the worst possible thing that could happen, as we know. >> HASKINS: Yes. >> IVES: We live in New York. >> GREEN: You're making them the same people, whereas in the movies, they're different. >> IVES: They're totally different. >> GREEN: Right. Where did the idea come from? This was an idea of yours originally? >> IVES: No, he came to me. The way this project started was actually quite interesting, because I knew Steve the way everybody knows everybody in the theater. And so we were, you know, colleagues. And he called me up one day, and he said, "Would you like to come over to my house? I want to talk to you about something. Come over and have a drink and chat. And it's not important." And I said, "Sure." And I'd never been to his house, so I thought, "Okay, fine." So I go to the famous house in Turtle Bay filled with puzzles and games. And so we have a drink, and we're chatting. And we have another drink, and we're chatting. And finally, I said, "So, Steve, what did you want to talk about? You said it's not important." And he said, "Did I say that?" And I said, "Uh, yeah, you said it wasn't important." He said, "Well, it might be important. I had this idea for a musical, and I was wondering if you'd like to work on it." And I thought, "I don't know. What's the idea," you know? [ Laughter ] "How good is your idea?" So, you know, he told me the idea, and I said, "Well, that's a good idea." And he said, "Well, I'm glad you say that, because I've been taking some notes." And he reached down, and he picked up a manila envelope. And he said, "Would you be willing to read these notes?" And I said, "Yeah," you know, "Sure. Fine." And so I took the notes and put them into my bag, and that was how it started. And so we just talked for the longest time about it. And I would go over there, or we'd talk on the phone, or we would e-mail each other. And we quickly realized that we had a number of things in common. We love '30s and '40s and '50s movies, you know? And we know all of -- It's like, he's the only person who knows who Whit Bissell is. >> GREEN: Aha. I interviewed Whit Bissell. >> IVES: You interviewed Whit Bissell? >> GREEN: I did. >> HASKINS: And I, too, know who he is, because in the casting days, you would find people saying, "I worked with Whit Bissell." >> IVES: Yes. So, anyway, you know, that's sort of the level of talk. And we also have similar tastes in music. You know, it's like, my interest in music ends with Bach and picks up again with Brahms, which is exactly the same for him. And so, we just found that we were talking well. >> GREEN: We're unfortunately running out of time. But where does it stand now? I know there's a production rumored for next year. How much is written? >> IVES: Well, my producers tell me it's happening in a year, so who am I not to believe them? >> GREEN: Oh, you haven't heard the rumors yet? Oh. >> IVES: Oh, you have a different rumor. >> HASKINS: But it's written. Is it done? >> GREEN: Partly written. >> IVES: I have written through. He's finished about half of it. You know, he's musicalized about half of it. We had a reading of it, of what we have, a couple of weeks ago, which was quite fun. And so we're well along. And we're chattering away all the time, not about Whit Bissell, but about Buñuel and this project. So it's immense fun. It's immensely challenging, needless to say, because Luis Buñuel is not known for his comic talent. And so we're having to playwright for Buñuel in this case, but in the same way that one has to playwright for Pierre Corneille, you know? But it is as much fun as one could possibly have. And that's where we are with -- >> HASKINS: Well, that is very cool, David Ives. "The Liar" at CSC. >> IVES: Right now. >> HASKINS: Yes, right now. Sort of related to a Corneille play, but it's all-new by you. And thank you so much. It's been wonderful talking to you. >> IVES: Thank you for having me on. >> HASKINS: Thank you, Jesse. >> GREEN: Thank you, Susan. >> HASKINS: Okay. Bye, everybody. ♪♪ Our thanks to the Friends of "Theater Talk" for their significant contribution to this production. >> ANNOUNCER: We welcome your questions or comments for "Theater Talk." Thank you.
