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David Ives has a well-earned reputation for writing clever and creative plays. His Sure Thing is a superior example. The simple one-act play has one set, two characters, and little movement, but depends on quick dialogue and a mysterious bell. Before the play manages to move from a beginning to an end, there are several false starts and also false endings as the characters explore various responses to each other, even becoming different personalities in the process.
The play begins with a young woman named Betty sitting in a coffee bar, reading. A man about her age comes in and asks if the empty chair next to her is taken; his name is Bill. She says the seat is taken, so he doesn't sit there. The end.
A bell rings, the play begins again, and this whole process repeats itself a few times. Sometimes Betty says the seat is taken, sometimes she says it isn't. When she says it isn't taken, sometimes she prefers to be alone, but eventually a version of the story has Bill sitting down with her and starting a conversation.
The story continues in this way, moving slowly forward because the action is moved back a few seconds every time the bell rings. In some versions, Bill tries to pick Betty up. Sometimes she is receptive, and they find they have similar interests. In another version, she viciously rejects Bill with a crushing diatribe. In other versions, the role is reversed; Betty tries to pick Bill up, and he may or may not be interested.
What becomes clear, though, is that these characters are not the same. They have the same names, always Bill and Betty, and they're always played by the same actor and actress. But the characters develop multiple histories during the course of the play. One Bill never went to college but lies and says he did, another went to a fundamentalist Christian school, and yet another Bill went to the Ivy League. As they discuss The Sound and the Fury, the book Betty is reading, one Bill thinks Hemingway wrote it, another is a great fan of Faulkner, but a third Bill prefers the New York Mets (a great non sequitur).
Betty also takes on different selves. One has just discovered Faulkner and is beginning to like him just as much as one of the Bills, but another thinks he's boring. Various Betties have "a sort-of boyfriend," but in one case that means her husband, in another case it means the man with whom she's about to break up, and in yet another case, Betty is a lesbian.
The function of the bell is always to affect some change in the dialogue which forces the action in a different direction. It seems to take the characters into parallel realities where they look the same and have the same names but are not the same people. There is a certain continuity to the parallel characters' histories, but their personalities are dramatically different, even diametrically opposed.
All of these different characters find themselves in a similar situation. But some of their situations end at what we might understand as the beginning, when Betty rejects Bill right away. Some end in the middle of the total play, as various Bills experience several ways of being rejected, and some even get to do the rejecting. And one version ends at the end, in which the characters find that they have everything in common and immediately make plans to get married and have children. So, by the time the play is over, the characters have thoroughly explored the fears as well as the absurd hopes of meeting a new person when romance is a possibility.
Will Burrows
David Ives Titles |
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