October 30, 2015
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Ives comes alive at the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium
by Jim Rutter

Here's the thing about David Ives' All in the Timing: You won't think it's Hamlet. But you're not a chimp, either
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However, to understand that joke, you'll have to see the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium's staging of Ives' six short plays, each a thinking person's comedy that abounds in the absurdity of language and that is articulated and captured by this fantastic little production.
The Hamlet joke refers to Words, Words, Words, Ives' take on a theorem (strangely enough, first postulated by Aristotle) that if you lock three monkeys in a room with typewriters, on an infinite timeline, they would eventually produce the entire script of Shakespeare's tragedy.
Here, Jennifer MacMillan, Andrew Carroll, and David Stanger (always apt in IRC productions) dive headfirst into Ives' clever wordplay. Their three monkeys (named Kafka, Swift, and Milton) peck at keyboards, and engage in comically cerebral debates as they ponder existence while haggling with their overseers for cigarettes.

Absurd? Yes. But you're not going to IRC (or Ives for that matter) for anything less, and the remaining skits dance around similarly intellectual topics. Variations on the Death of Trotsky gives a Borgeslike take on the manner in which the communist-in-exile would react to his own assassination.

As Trotsky, Stanger delivers a delicious deadpan. With an ax protruding from the back of his head, he employs language in an attempt to outwit destiny. With a sharp eye for the domestic in the metaphysical, Ives has Trotsky's wife (MacMillan) harp on the impracticalities of differentiating between what exact verb led to his demise. Tina Brock's direction captures each quick quip before a bell sounds to repeat the scene with a different, more hilarious twist.

Two of the remaining sketches ( Sure Thing and The Universal Language) tackle the absurdity of communication head-on, first in a couple who must repeat their entire seductive conversation each time they misstep (to the point of changing pasts and political affiliations); the second, a nervous woman's (Kristen Norine) attempt to cure her stuttering by studying Unamunda, a gibberish-sounding phonetic language.
It might sound intense, but it's hardly heady here. Instead, under Stanger's direction, the comedy sticks in a lighthearted way, reminiscent of the film Groundhog Day, with each conveying, in the folly of language, the idiosyncratic little touches of linguistic nonsense that only a pair in love understands.

Even a chimp would get that.

October 30, 2015
Phindie
ALL IN THE TIMING (IRC): Six fast and funny existentialist shorts
by Debra Miller

Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium returns to the cabaret stage of L’Etage for an eight-performance run of David Ives’ ALL IN THE TIMING, a 75-minute collection of one-act\alternate realities by asking the ubiquitous question, “What if?” Performed by a stellar ensemble of six IRC regulars (Tina Brock, Andrew Carroll, Jennifer MacMillan, Kristen Norine, Bob Schmidt, and David Stanger), the set of six shorts provides perfect paradoxes for the company’s signature style of meaningful absurdity, filled with intelligent wit, intellectual references, and intriguing allusions.

What if “The Philadelphia” were a metaphysical black hole in physical New York, where everything is reversed, everyone is contrary, and “No matter what you ask for, you can’t get it”? What if three chimps, named after renowned authors, were given typewriters in a behavioral-science observation lab, while monkeying around and munching on bananas and peanuts? Would their random typing of “Words, Words, Words” eventually result in Hamlet? What if we all shared “The Universal Language” of Unamunda? Would lonely people communicate better, lose their self-conscious impediments, and find happiness? What if post-modern composer “Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread”? Would his experience in the bakery be as ‘unchanging’ as his reiterative minimalist music? What if we could hit the reset button, turn back time, and replay the unfortunate episodes of our lives? Would an awkward encounter between two lovelorn strangers become a “Sure Thing,” and would there be “Variations on the Death of Trotsky,” so that the revolutionary leader could evade his fate and rewrite history? Or would destiny always intervene?

Those are the existentialist dilemmas addressed in the IRC’s ridiculously smart and entertaining production. Directed with fast-paced energy by Brock, Stanger, and Norine, the actors are flawless in their rapid-fire delivery, as they tackle the nonsense of life with serious hilarity and meet the demands of the playwright’s complex wordplay with seemingly effortless fluidity. Stanger is especially impressive in his fluent jabbering of Unamunda, as he teaches the fraudulent new language to the enthusiastic quick-study Norine, in a sequence that pays homage to the French Princess Katherine’s English lesson from Shakespeare’s Henry V. Brock and Schmidt are perfectly paired as the romantic misfits who repeatedly take back self-defeating comments on their first unexpected encounter, and Carroll and MacMillan excel at the expressive physical comedy inherent in their roles as the doomed Trotsky and his wife. Costumier Erica Hoelscher, prop designer Mark Williams, light and sound operator Gil Johnson, and musical director Norine provide an engagingly clever design for the delightfully zany show. It all adds up to one terrific time with the IRC’s ALL IN THE TIMING!

[L’Etage, 624 S. 6th St., 2nd floor] October 28-November 7, 2015; idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org.

October 30, 2015
DC Metro Arts
All in the Timing at Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium in Philadelphia
By Melissa Rodier

The L’Etage Cabaret’s lounge, with its mood lighting and leather seating and tea candles, is the perfect setting for the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium’s treatment of David Ives’s All in the Timing. It very possibly could have been “all in the setting,” as the lounge created such a warm feeling of intimacy to the entire affair. The warm ambience was soothing, lulling me to sink into the soft leather and settle in for a fantastic night. Of course, it could also be renamed “All in the Telling” as the Consortium brought these six stories together in a fantastic way in little over an hour and fifteen minutes. One of the best features of the evening had to be exactly the order the six plays were presented. Other productions have traditionally ended with Variations on the Death of Trotsky or have stuck The Philadelphia somewhere in the middle.

The Tina Brock and David Stranger directed production, well aware of its audience, began with The Philadelphia. The audience is already in a Philadelphia – and most of us Philadelphia people are often sadly aware we have spent our entire lives in a Philadelphia – and the regional recognition cannot help but bring the audience into the show. The use of the lounge space for this short play was clever, and really used the space to pull the audience further into the show. One of the lighter plays in the entire sextet, and it serves the night so much better to put this in the front, allowing the evening to build up beautifully.

The next offering was Sure Thing, a story of missed connections and second and two-hundredth chances. While there were a few missed cues from the production person handling the bell, it was easy to forgive given the fast-paced momentum of the story. There was an easy flow, and something recognizable in all the scenarios. The entire ten minutes demanded something of a skill in acting acrobatics, as not only did the dialogue reset with every ring of the bell, but so too did the tone and motivation for the two characters in the center. The actors, Tina Brock and Bob Schmidt did a great job of shifting between openness and shielded hostility to toxicity, all featuring an underlying loneliness with a slim (but possible) chance of connecting.

Then the evening really began to take off with Variations on the Death of Trostsky. Andrew Carroll infuses Trotsky with an arrogant charm that makes it clear why being the wife of an historical figure could be difficult, something that Jennifer MacMillan exudes with every encyclopedic reading. One of the great things about the layering of the plays, and the order that Brock and company decided to use, is that those echoes of the previous plays really sound out as the night moves along. The Trotskys are in a Philadelphia. The Trotskys are in a loop of possibilities like our couple in Sure Thing. What is fantastic about the Trotsky story is the way it weaves in tragedy with hope, a theme throughout all six of the plays in All in the Timing. Something else that happens often, that happened before this play and happened after as the night went on, was the clever use of the small space provided. Just like how Ives does not have a wasted word, the Consortium does not waste an inch of physical space, whether confined to the stage or moving out into the audience space. There is an almost elastic energy and chemistry between the actors, the way they move around each other both figuratively and literally, and while it has existed before this point, it is here that it truly began to show through for me.

The Universal Language. What to say about The Universal Language? There is that underlying loneliness that was present in The Sure Thing, but Kristen Norine brings such a force of determination and hope to her performance, that her joy in rattling off this new language is infectious. Norine and David Stranger really brought the language to life with an energy felt throughout the room. Quick and funny, poignant and meaningful, playful and insightful, the Universal Language is this evening at its best, both as far as Ives as a playwright is concerned and the Consortium’s production.

Words, Words, Words is where things get the most fun, fun, fun. The play is a treat for any lover of theater, literature, or the old adage about infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters seeking to make one Hamlet. If it were possible to headline my article with a quote from the play, I am sure it would have come from here. Too many deep things come out of one of the funniest plays of the evening. Tragedy and comedy meet head on here, and the actors do a fantastic job. Especially great here, and one of the standouts of the entire evening, was Carroll. Echoing back to his earlier Trotsky, Carroll’s Swift, while filled with defiance and discontent, also exudes that secret optimism for something better that drives all rebels. Garnering some of the biggest laughs of the evening, Words, Words, Words also confronts the very art form it is presenting in the most direct way.

Finally, appropriately ending the show was Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread. Hilarious, with a satirical twist of poignancy, the Consortium does a great job parodying musical theater. The selection for the ending play though, more than anything else, highlights what the Consortium did so well in producing Ives’s All in the Timing.

Kudos to Prop Designer Mark Williams, Light and Sound Operator Gil Johnson, Costume Designer Erica Hoelscher, and Musical Director Kristen Norine who contributed immensely to the enjoyment of the production.

In its arrangement of the six plays, the Consortium created its very own kind of symphonic movement. The way the plays came together was like a sweeping musical movement, one that, despite the heavy material in parts, left one with a feeling of joy and fun. All in the Timing, as told by the Consortium, has a bittersweet joy and optimism that beats through all of the many laughs.

Running Time: Approximately 75 minutes, without an intermission.

All in the Timing plays through November 7, 2015 by Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, performing at L’Etage Cabaret – 624 South 6th Street (above Beau Monde), in Philadelphia, PA. For tickets purchase them online.

RATING: 4 1/2 stars

October 31, 2015
NealsPaper.com
All in the Timing — Idiopathic Ridculopathy Consortium at L’Etage
by Neal Zoren

Tina Brock and David Stanger’s production of David Ives’s loopy one-acts, “All in the Timing” is an occasion of grand serendipity.
“Timing’s’ half-dozen sketches seem handmade for Brock’s Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, the actors from which, including Brock and Stanger, are proving what timing is all about and how it enhances comedy. While taking a broad approach, the IRC ensemble milks every ounce of humor from Ives’s comically bountiful and deliciously creative riffs. To a person, each cast member finds a way to give Ives’s treasure trove more bounce, more oomph, and more laughs than in the usual evening of entertainment. Stanger and Kristen Norine fluently and flawlessly have intelligible conversations in a nonsense language, Unamundo, that an inspired Ives invented for this skit. Andrew Carroll creates hilarity just by walking towards the stage as an immediately identifiable Leon Trotsky with a climber’s spike smashed in his bewigged skull.
Not an ice pick, as legend says and Trotsky dreamed. But an climber’s spike as a reference book that serves as the springboard for this sketch tells us.

Stanger and Carroll deftly sail through another Ives invention, “The Philadelphia,” a stroke of bad luck that comes over you suddenly and makes it impossible for anything to go right or logically in your life.

Several of Ives’s vignettes involves bells that ring to indicate a change in a character’s attitude and answers. For instance in “Sure Thing,” Brock and Bob Schmidt, are two singles who meet in a café that is designed more for lounging with a book than for just sipping and leaving. Schmidt’s character begins the gambit by asking Brock’s if he can share her table, which has an empty seat. She says no in several ways and yes in several more, a bell, like the kind on a hotel registrar’s desk, indicating the variation. All kinds of combinations and permutations emerge as Brock’s Betty and Schmidt’s Bill, thwart and embrace each other in turn. The actors are ripe for the challenge of this particular Ives exercise in timing. They neither rush nor delay their responses. They are always sharply on cue and cunningly hilarious.

The wonderful part of Ives’s sketches is they go beyond being vehicles with a gimmick and reveal the agile mind and ample imagination of this writer. Ives takes the familiar and skews it. Everybody’s heard about Trotsky and the ice pick, but Ives, motivated by an encyclopedia entry mentioning the climber’s spike, makes a great comic romp of the difference in weapons and goes further by having Trotsky, his wife, and his assassin discussing all the parameters of the murder and the choice of the spike. (The assassin tells us he looked for an ice pick to be true to legend but couldn’t find one.) All of these rollicking exchanges end with Carroll falling dead on Trotsky’s desk from the assassin’s fatal blow.
In another sketch, Ives lampoons the commonly stated example of probability that says a group of monkeys, left alone in a room with typewriters, will eventually write “Hamlet.” Ives names the chimps in his “Words, Words, Words,” Swift, Kafka, and Milton. It begins by Stanger’s Milton looking at his typewriter and reading a famous passage from Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” This Milton, Carroll’s Swift, and Jennifer MacMillan’s Kafka are intellectuals who discuss who this Hamlet might be and how they’re supposed “Hamlet” if no one tells them what they expect. In a great flight of comic irony, Carroll conversationally quotes Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” while discussing the unfairness of the assignment or the oppression of the keepers who monitor its progress. His recitation of the “insolence of office” and “proud man’s contumely” from the “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy is wonderful, spoken well as with meaning while making Swift’s point about the nonsense the authorities are inflicting on the chimps.
Ives’s skits are all double edged (if only double). Each is a parody of human foibles, swindles, beliefs, or behaviors that becomes compounded as characters in a sketch vie or strive for what they say they want. Each also spoofs some aspect of life, whether it be about dating or falling into funk (that Philadelphia again!)

Shakespeare and Trotsky are joined by composer Philip Glass in Ives’s satiric sights. Stanger, Carroll, MacMillan, and Norine go into a repetitive musical number while moving mechanically in an aural and physical send-up of Glass’s compositions.

The gags are non-stop, and so is the talent. IRC’s “All in the Timing” is truly a group effort in which all cast members play their parts to the hilt while feeding and responding brilliantly to the material before them. The cast is so good, they convince you they are average people, or chimps, going about their business among mayhem that, in Trotsky’s case, kills him.

Artistry is at work from the actors and the author. Even small parts on the fringes of skits have impact. Carroll’s sincerity as a new student who arrives for lessons just as Stanger’s instructor admits Unamundo is a fraud, enhances the already impressive exchange in which Stanger and Norine speak the so called “Universal Language” as if it was their patois of habit. Norine’s intent Ramon is hilarious as he, Trotsky’s murderer, shares moment of concern with Mr. and Mrs. Trotsky and explains calmly, and with only enough apology to be polite, why he committed his act, the dastardliness of which depends on your assessment of Leon Trotsky. Not a move is wasted, on the L’Etage stage or in Ives’s text. Everything in “All in the Timing” conspires to give you a good time.

I get a kick out of the way Ives’s mind works. I especially enjoy his naming periods of when everything goes wrong, when even in restaurants you have to order the opposite of what you want to get what you want, a Philadelphia. While I am proud of what entrepreneurs in the culinary and performing arts have managed to do in my hometown, I am consistently dismayed at the historical incompetence of Philadelphia’s political and civic leaders and often say, “If you want done wrong, or stupidly, ask a Philadelphian.” (Hey, I am about to vote for someone whose name I can’t remember for mayor because I loathe the career pol who has plagued City Council for 30 years and will be the eventual winner. It’s an Ivesian Philadelphia!)

Carroll and Stanger are especially good in the Philadelphia sketch. Stanger enters the scene in a “Los Angeles,” which means everything is laid back, cool, and copacetic. It’s Carroll who brings the Philadelphia cloud to the proceedings. Carroll’s a master at showing his character’s frustration of being in a perpetual Mercury retrograde, unable to accomplish or even explain to anyone what he wants or what he’s going through. Stanger’s “Angelino” understands and sympathizes. Until the “Philadelphia” becomes contagious.

Brock and Schmidt play a social chess of sorts to the timing of Ives’s bell. Every time the bell sounds, what could be in a nanosecond or in two minutes, Brock and Schmidt’s characters change their mind about something, usually becoming amenable after being contrary, withholding, or suspicious.

I admire the way Brock directed the “Words, Words, Words” scene, having the “chimps” take their cues more from their literary counterparts than from their status as apes. The intellectual side of the creatures emerges. You see them as think tank denizens who are working to solve this Hamlet conundrum. In their midst of their comic pondering, Brock or the actors throw in a subtle sign of apehood, such as Carroll nonchalantly wiping his backside with his fingers and flinging whatever he allegedly finds casually to the side.

Kristen Norine, who made an impression this spring in IRC’s “Misalliance,” is a truly deft comedian. She conveyed just the right mixture of commitment and matter-of-fact domesticity as Trotsky’s killer. Her character’s speed at picking up Unamundo is amazing, Both she and Stanger rate high admiration for their ability to sound so facile and thorough while speaking in Ives’s fictional tongue. It was as much fun listening to them spout gibberish as it must have been for Ives to create his language. The great things Unamundo contains enough context clues that we can follow what Norine and Stanger are saying no matter how arcane Unamundo gets.

Jennifer MacMillan is a wonderful sketch comedian. Her uncaring waitress, more interested in getting away from her customers than feeding them, can come from any of the ungracious spots in Atlantic City. Her reactions and curiosities as Trotsky’s wife were funny and entertaining.
Brock, Stanger, and their troupe could easily replace the current nuclear cast of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” They are that adroit at making Ives’s comedy come through with dividends. With Ives as their writer, they have infinitely better, much funnier material to work with.

Brock and Stanger keeps their production as simple as possible. There are no big effects, and big props like a blackboard and three portable typewriters are maneuvered nicely and seem natural. IRC shows that good theater is often a matter of sharp line reading, pinpoint execution, and keeping the material entertaining. They do all of the listed well, Ives’s shrewdly intelligent skits providing a headstart Andrew Carroll, Kristen Norine, David Stanger, Tina Brock, Bob Schmidt, and Jennifer MacMillan take to the winner’s circle.

One more hero needs to be cited, Mark Williams, who designed or built the props. Oh, and let’s not forget Erica Hoelscher’s witty costumes, especially in the Trotsky and “Hamlet” scenes.

“All in the Timing,” produced by the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, through Saturday, November 7 at L’Etage (above Beau Monde creperie), 624 S. 6th Street, in Philadelphia. (Enter on Bainbridge Street. Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov, 3, Wednesday, Nov. 4, and Saturday, Nov. 7. Tickets are $20 and can be obtained by visiting www.idiopathicridiculosityconsortium.org.