Review: Ives comes alive at the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium

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.

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.

"All in the Timing." Through Nov. 7 at L'Etage nightclub, 624 S. Sixth St. Tickets: $20. Information: idiopathicridiculopathyconsortium.org.