David Ives (born July 11, 1950) 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. Early life and education Ives wrote his first play when he 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 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. Theater His play, Canvas, 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 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 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