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46-571: Andromède ( Andromeda ) is a French verse play in a prologue and five acts by Pierre Corneille , first performed on 1 February 1650 by the Troupe Royale de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne at the Théâtre Royal de Bourbon in Paris. The story is taken from Books IV and V of Ovid 's Metamorphoses and concerns the transformation of Perseus and Andromeda . The play has rarely been revived and

92-525: 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

138-499: 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

184-447: A host of lesser figures, devoted much time to the closet drama, in a signal that the verse tragedy was already in a state of obsolescence. That is, while poets of the eighteenth century could write so-so poetic dramas, the public taste for new examples was already moving away by the start of the nineteenth century, and there was little commercial appeal in staging them. Instead, opera would take up verse drama, as something to be sung: it

230-547: 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. His play, Canvas ,

276-482: A revival of All in the Timing in January 2013. This new production was directed by John Rando. His plays have been published in the anthologies All in the Timing , Time Flies , and Polish Joke And Other Plays . In the mid-1990s, Ives contributed pieces to Spy Magazine , The New York Times Magazine , and The New Yorker . New York magazine named him one of the "100 Smartest New Yorkers". When asked by

322-513: A socio-political force and as a platform for dramaturgies of foreignness." Nigerian Inua Ellams explores his identity that escapes geographical, national, and temporal boundaries. Russian Olga Shilyaeva in her 2018 28 дней. Трагедия менструального цикла ( 28 Days. The tragedy of a menstrual cycle ) uses verse to talk about experience of menstruation . Irish Stefanie Preissner in her Our Father (2011) and Solpadeine Is My Boyfriend (2012) plays with autobiography and her multiple identities "as

368-623: 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 ,

414-737: 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

460-463: Is a short play that was written as part of a theatrical concept that began in 1995 on the lower East Side of Manhattan, in which a group of writers, actors and directors would gather together to create a play from scratch, rehearse it, and perform it — all within 24 hours. The Blizzard, and eight of Ives' other short plays, was produced on the radio by Playing On Air , directed by John Rando and starred Jesse Eisenberg . Primary Stages presented

506-428: 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. Ives wrote his first play when he

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552-572: Is from Corneille. The premiere production incorporated spectacular scenery, set changes, and special effects, designed by Giacomo Torelli . Many of the sets were recycled from Torelli's production of Luigi Rossi 's opera Orfeo , performed at the Palais-Royal in 1647. A series of six engravings created by François Chauveau , depicting scenes from the prologue and five acts of Andromède , were published in Rouen in 1651, both separately and with

598-456: Is mostly remembered today for the set of six engravings by François Chauveau depicting the elaborate Baroque set designs of Giacomo Torelli . The play was commissioned by Cardinal Mazarin in 1648 but wasn't finished until 1650. Corneille dedicated the piece to an unknown woman designated by four uppercase M's. According to Abel Lefranc , the M's represent Madame de Motteville , the confidante of Anne of Austria . The list of characters

644-403: Is particularly relevant for contemporary theatre practice because the dialogical relationship between its rhythmic and lexical levels speaks to the globalized world's pluralistic nature. Lech discusses how artists such as Polish Radosław Rychcik and Spanish-British Teatro Inverso use verse in multilingual contexts "as a performative tool to engage with and reflect on interlingual processes as

690-554: Is still the case that a verse libretto can be successful. Verse drama as such, however, in becoming closet drama, became simply a longer poetic form, without the connection to practical theatre and performance. According to Robertson Davies in A Voice From the Attic , closet drama is "Dreariest of literature, most second hand and fusty of experience!" But indeed a great deal of it was written in Victorian times , and afterwards, to

736-622: 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

782-672: The Joseph Jefferson Award for "new adaptation". His play, Is He Dead? adapted from an "unproduced 1898 comedy" by Mark Twain , ran on Broadway from December 2007 to March 2008. New Jerusalem , concerning the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza , opened Off-Broadway in January 2008 (previews from December 2007) in a Classic Stage Company production. New Jerusalem won a Hull-Warriner Award. In 2010, he adapted Pierre Corneille 's comedy The Liar for The Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. It won

828-656: 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

874-469: 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 ,

920-637: The Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play at the Helen Hayes Awards in Washington the following year. In 2011 his version of Molière ’s The Misanthrope premiered Off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company under the title, The School For Lies . Also in 2011 his adaptation of Jean-Francois Regnard ’s Le Legataire universel premiered at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. under

966-754: The Death of Trotsky and Other Short Comedies (1992) All In the Timing: Six One-Act Comedies (1994) All In the Timing: Fourteen Plays (1995) Mere Mortals and Others (1997) or Mere Mortals: Six One-Act Comedies (1998) Long Ago And Far Away and Other Short Plays (Revised Edition) (1999) Lives of the Saints: Seven One-Act Plays (2000) Time Flies and Other Short Plays (2001) The Other Woman and Other Short Pieces (2008) Lives of

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1012-482: The English tradition. In the English language, verse has continued. In the new millennium, there has been a resurgence in interest in the form of verse drama. Some of them came in blank verse or iambic pentameter and endeavour to be in conversation with Shakespeare's writing styles. King Charles III by Mike Bartlett , written in iambic pentameter, played on the West End and Broadway, as well as being filmed with

1058-554: 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

1104-605: The Lansburgh Theatre in Washington, DC. In April 2018, Red Bull Theater presented the New York premiere The Metromaniacs, his "translaptation" of a rediscovered French farce by Alexis Piron at The Duke on 42nd Street directed by Michael Kahn . 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

1150-466: 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

1196-498: 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

1242-412: The character she performs, as the performer, the writer, and a voice of a young generation of Ireland facing the drastic political, social, and personal changes and desperately looking for predictability." Dramatic verse occurs in a dramatic work, such as a play , composed in poetic form. The tradition of dramatic verse extends at least as far back as ancient Greece . The English Renaissance saw

1288-638: The extent that it became a more popular long form at least than the faded epic . Prolific in the form were, for example, Michael Field and Gordon Bottomley . Dramatic poetry is any poetry that uses the discourse of the characters involved to tell a story or portray a situation. The major types of dramatic poetry are those already discussed, to be found in plays written for the theatre, and libretti . There are further dramatic verse forms: these include dramatic monologues , such as those written by Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson and Shakespeare. David Ives#Theater David Ives (born July 11, 1950)

1334-528: The eyes are looking at the machines, but I have been careful to have nothing sung that is essential to the understanding of the play because the words are generally badly understood in music." Most of the music has been lost, except for two choruses published in Airs à quatre parties (Robert Ballard, Paris, 1653). Verse play For a very long period, verse drama was the dominant form of drama in Europe (and

1380-540: The height of dramatic verse in the English-speaking world, with playwrights including Ben Jonson , Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare developing new techniques, both for dramatic structure and poetic form. Though a few plays, for example A Midsummer Night's Dream , feature extended passages of rhymed verse, the majority of dramatic verse is composed as blank verse ; there are also passages of prose. Dramatic verse began to decline in popularity in

1426-672: 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 . The Blizzard

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1472-505: The magazine to comment on being so listed for the same issue, Ives’ response began, "Grocery lists. Spelling lists. Laundry lists. The very idea of lists has something inherently narrow, petty, unpoetic about it. "List, list, O list!" cried Hamlet ’s father's ghost in exasperation, and I couldn't agree more   ..." His translation of Georges Feydeau 's farce A Flea in Her Ear was produced at Chicago Shakespeare in 2006, and won

1518-416: The nineteenth century, when the prosaic and conversational styles of playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen became more prevalent, and were adapted in English by George Bernard Shaw . Verse drama did have a role in the development of Irish theatre . An important trend from around 1800 was the closet drama : a verse drama intended to be read from the page, rather than performed. Byron and Shelley , as well as

1564-641: The original cast for the BBC. Likewise, La Bete by David Hirson , which endeavours to recreate Moliere 's farces in rhyming couplets, enjoyed several prominent productions on both sides of the Atlantic. David Ives , known best for his short, absurdist work, has turned to " transladaptation " (his word) in his later years: translating and updating French farces, such as The School for Lies and The Metromaniacs , both of which premiered in New York City. With

1610-814: The plays had been produced previously. The Lives of the Saints was produced with five of the plays at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stockbridge, Massachusetts in August and September 1999. His play, The Liar , based on a 17th-century play by Pierre Corneille opened at the Classic Stage Company in New York January 26, 2017. He has continued to base plays on 17th century French plays: in 2017, The School for Lies , based on Moliere 's play The Misanthrope , opened at

1656-584: The renewed interest in verse drama, theatre companies are looking for "new Shakespeare" plays to produce. In 2017, the American Shakespeare Center founded Shakespeare's New Contemporaries (SNC), which solicits new plays in conversation with Shakespeare's canon. This was partially in response to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioning "modern English" versions of Shakespeare plays. SNC has been on hold since

1702-466: The role she created Off-Broadway and Hugh Dancy played the role originated by Bentley. Walter Bobbie once again directed. The play transferred to the Lyceum Theatre in February 2012 for an extended run with Arianda and Dancy reprising their performances. All in the Timing was, after Shakespeare plays, the most produced play in the United States during the 1995–1996 season, and Venus in Fur

1748-412: The second edition of the play. Charles d'Assoucy composed incidental music , which included airs, duets, and choruses, that primarily functioned to cover up the noise of the stage machinery during scene changes and special effects, such as the descent of Jupiter , Juno and Neptune in the final act. Corneille did not look too favorably on the music: "I have employed music only to satisfy the ear while

1794-626: The start of the COVID-19 pandemic . However, the twenty-first century also saw theatre practitioners using verse and hybrid forms in a much wider selection of dramatic texts and theatrical performances and forms than those inspired by Shakespeare. A transnational researcher, Kasia Lech, showed that contemporary practices reach for verse to test the boundaries of verse drama and its traditions in Western theatre, including English-language theatre but also Polish, Spanish, and Russian. Lech argues that verse

1840-699: The title, The Heir Apparent . The Heir Apparent opened Off-Broadway in March 2014 (previews) at the Classic Stage Company, and ran through May 2014. Venus in Fur opened Off-Broadway at the Classic Stage Company in January 2010 with Nina Arianda and Wes Bentley . Venus in Fur premiered on Broadway in October 2011 (previews) at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre , produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club . Nina Arianda returned to

1886-416: Was also important in non-European cultures). Greek tragedy and Racine 's plays are written in verse, as is almost all of William Shakespeare 's, Ben Jonson 's and John Fletcher 's drama, and other works like Goethe 's Faust and Henrik Ibsen 's early plays. In most of Europe, verse drama has remained a prominent art form, while at least popularly, it has been tied almost exclusively to Shakespeare in

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1932-513: Was most produced, after Shakespeare plays, during the 2013–2014 season. His Lives of the Saints began in previews Off-Broadway at Primary Stages in February 2015, running through March 27, 2015. Directed by John Rando, Lives of the Saints consists of seven short plays. The plays are: Enigma Variations , The Mystery at Twicknam Vicarage , Babel's in Arms , Soap Opera , Lives of the Saints , Arabian Nights , and Captive Audience. Several of

1978-431: 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

2024-659: 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

2070-484: Was released in 2008. 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 . Note: David Ives also helped mount 33 Encores! Series adaptations between 1995-2013. Note: Plays in bold are published here for the very first time. Years listed are the date of their debut. Four Short Comedies (1989) Variations on

2116-568: 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 . Ives wrote The Phobia Clinic ,

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