January 21–28, 1999

noises off

Cloomna Floofa Himna Flek?

by David Warner

		He Has A Way With Words: Playwright David Ives.

How did you learn all those lines? It's the question every actor gets asked, and it's a vapid one—except, perhaps, when it's being asked of an actor in a play by David Ives.

Because actors who brave Ives' wacky universe must not only learn lines, they often have to master a whole new language.

Like Unamunda, "The Universal Language" in Ives' play of the same name (from his acclaimed bill of one-acts, All in the Timing). Or monkey: as spoken by the hapless chimps in the one-act "Words, Words, Words," it sounds like English but turns into nonsense when they try to type Hamlet.

Then there's "cloomna floofa himna flek." I'm not sure if I'm spelling that one right, since I only heard it during a recent tech rehearsal for Lives of the Saints, Ives' newest collection of short plays, which is premiering this week at the Philadelphia Theatre Company. "Cloomna floofa himna fleck" (or is it "klumna phlupha himnaffleck"?) is a key phrase in the instructions given two construction workers faced with the unenviable task of building the Tower of Babel (which they're not even sure how to pronounce).

"And don't forget the shpunt!" they're reminded.

Though the "The Tower of Babel" tech was necessarily a stop-and-start affair, and the script still a work-in-progress (some of the lines had just been given to the cast the night before), the actors' ease with each other and with the text, including cloomna floofa whatever, was a pleasure to watch.

What's it take to be an Ives actor? "A real affection for the lunacy of life," said Saints director John Rando during a rehearsal break, "and the ability to transform that into performance. And since each actor [in Saints] plays at least six characters, instant transformations are critical."

Rando knows the five actors in Saints are up to the task because, well, he knows the five actors. He has worked numerous times with all five—Nancy Opel, Annie O'Sullivan, Danton Stone, Arnie Burton and Bradford Cover, the first four in Ives plays in New York and regional productions.

"Since most of them know his rhythms and his language, that's very helpful."

But they wear their knowledge lightly. While an Ives actor may need to be a virtuoso of the spoken word, an Ives character is more likely to be a regular guy flummoxed by the vagaries of language. The duality, Rando points out, reflects the playwright's own background: a mix of Yale Drama School and "that wonderful Chicago Polish working-class underbelly."

Since meeting Ives four years ago, Rando, 37, has worked with the New York-based playwright (who says he's "48 going on 14") on several productions, including his acclaimed adaptation of Strike Up the Band for City Center's Encores series. Once it was decided that Saints would get an out-of-NYC tryout, the team decided Philadelphia would be the best place to do it—despite the fact that Ives, in his play "The Philadelphia," makes the city synonymous with a condition in which "no matter what you ask for, you can't get it."

But Ives and Rando got what they asked for with Philadelphia Theatre Company: a proscenium space (Plays and Players) with an almost vaudevillian feel; an organization with a successful track record for pre-Broadway tryouts (Master Class, Bunny Bunny); and their own choice of actors (and set designer, Ives vet Russell Metheny).

"Since we feel like it's a company, we asked if we could continue to do this," and PTC agreed. PTC's first foray into Ives country, the much-praised 1994 production of All in the Timing, featured a mix of NY and local actors (Pearce Bunting, Tim Moyer). But Rando and Ives wanted the security of working with their own people—or "companions in the craft," as Rando puts it—because, unlike Timing, all of the pieces in Saints are brand new.

Rando has another Philly connection: He's working with playwright Michael Hollinger on developing An Empty Plate at the Cafe de Grand Boeuf. An early success for Hollinger at the Arden, Boeuf is a "wonderful" play, raves Rando.

He directed it for the Berkshire Theater Festival last summer and plans are now afoot to stage it in New York. "We're hoping to put Michael on the national map."

Merion resident Jeanne Murray Walker may be the best-known Philadelphia playwright nobody in Philadelphia knows about. Though she didn't start writing for the theater till about eight years ago, she's won numerous competitions and has had scripts produced in London, Washington, Boston and Chicago. But it wasn't until this month that a play of hers won an area production: Rowing into Light on Lake Adley (see Anita Donovan's review, p. 31) premiered Jan. 15 at the University of Delaware, where Walker teaches English.

Not that Walker, 53, is unknown in Philadelphia cultural circles. After all, she won a $50,000 Pew Fellowship last year. But that was in poetry, not scriptworks. A successful poet even before she began teaching at Delaware, she decided to try playwriting "on a dare": A director friend, Nancy King, told Walker that if she turned some monologues she'd written into a play, King would direct them. The result, Stories from the National Enquirer, won her an agent, a production in London, a script competition in Washington, DC, and a commission in Chicago.

Rowing is the first new play ever done in the history of Delaware's 25-year-old Professional Theater Training Program (PTTP). Working close to home has proved a welcome change from most of Walker's experiences with new play production—flying to a theater in another part of the country, staying for a week of intensive rehearsal, then leaving ("You swear to one another when you leave you're going to see each other and you never do"). The PTTP production, under the direction of Sanford Robbins, allowed her the luxury to "settle in."

Writing plays, Walker has discovered, is "horrifically much more difficult than I thought it was." And at the moment she has "three years of plays to write and directors to hook up with," including a commission for Hedgerow.

But she welcomes the daunting schedule.

"It means there's work to do."