Ringing the Bell

By RICHARD CORLISS

A scantily dressed stage. A few dexterous actors. And, offstage, a hotel-desk bell. In David Ives' fertile world, these are the only requirements for theater that aerobicizes the brain and tickles the heart.

Ives, 43, is the new off-off-Broadway sensation. Critical and popular response to All in the Timing, an evening of six Ives caprices, has cued a stampede to New York City's tiny Primary Stages, from whence they will soon move to roomier quarters. But Ives is more than a Manhattan fad. He is a mordant comic who has put the play back in playwright.

Sure Thing, the opening playlet, is 40 cunning variations on meeting cute. A young man approaches a young woman seated at a restaurant table. Every time he or she says something clumsy or frosty a bell rings (ding!), the actors freeze and the process ratchets back a step. Movie-wise playgoers with a sense of deja vu will wonder if this isn't Groundhog Day all over again. Well, worry not about Ives' originality or his consistency. Sure Thing was first seen in 1988, five years before the Bill Murray comedy. Further, all six of the Timing pieces are ingenious retakes on the same theme.

Consider. On the day he dies, Leon Trotsky sits at his desk, a mountaineer's ax protruding from his head, and muses on mortality nine different ways. Philip Glass visits a bakery to buy some bread, and the scene is replayed as a chanted Glass opera. In a cage, three monkeys grouse at their typewriters, condemned to stay there till one of them pounds out Hamlet. A fellow at a restaurant can never get what he wants unless he orders something else, because he is in a twilight funk called "a Philadelphia." In The Universal Language, Ives' warmest, newest sketch, a woman with a speech impediment enrolls in a course for a jabberwocky tongue that only she and her teacher speak: English is "John Cleese," stammering is "tongue Stoppard."

Ives is a wondrous wordmaster and, as spiffily directed by Jason McConnell / Buzas, these elfin works could be called Stoppard Lite. But they are really Beckett Brisk, for they are about the creative process, frantic and forlorn, of getting through life. They suggest that all human existence is an improvisatory rehearsal for some grand opening night that may never arrive. Panic is the universal language. And yet, as Ives shows, rewriting life can produce a happy ending. Destiny may be, as his Trotsky says, "only a capitalist explanation for the status quo," but it can also be a sure thing. As two lovers, rapturous in bed at the beginning (and of course at the end) of another Ives play, Ancient History, dreamily say, If their happiness could be bottled, "the world would be littered with empties."

Perhaps Ives will make bigger bottles -- longer plays -- with the same effervescence he compresses into this six-pack. Meantime, here is an evening of great pleasure and promise. How delicious, in these dour theater days of revivals and stillbirths, to have something to look forward to -- again (ding!) and again (ding!) and again (blackout).