Artist Interview: David Ives
The playwright talks with us about THE HEIR APPARENT, its source, and his process for adapting great work.
In his notes for the original production of The Heir Apparent, onstage November 8 through December 16, 2018, at Lantern Theater Company, playwright David Ives shared his first impression of its source material, Jean- François Regnard’s 1708 comedy Le Légataire universel: “I had never heard of Regnard. Yet…I needed only a single reading to know I had to take on the piece.” The Heir Apparent became the second of his “transladaptations,” Ives’ word to describe his modern reworkings of classic French comedies, which have become one of his many calling cards as a writer.
The American playwright, translator, screenwriter, and novelist wrote his first play at nine years old and had his first play produced when he was just 22. He is perhaps best known for his short comic plays, including All in the Timing, an evening of six one-acts that premiered in 1993 and contributed to the The New York Times dubbing him “maestro of the short form.” He writes long-form comedy and drama as well, including Venus in Fur and New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656, which was one of the best-selling productions in the Lantern’s 25-year history. The Liar (another Ives hit produced here at the Lantern) was the first of his several transladaptations, including 2011’s The Heir Apparent and School for Lies (from Molière’s 1666 The Misanthrope), and 2015’s The Metromaniacs (from Alexis Piron’s 1738 La Métromanie).
We recently spoke with David Ives about transladaptations, verse and rhyme, and comedy.
What is it about 17th and 18th century French comedy that lends itself particularly well to your transladaptation work?
I don’t have a good answer to that — if only because plays tend to happen for personal and practical reasons rather than historical or academic ones. I didn’t move into 17th and 18th-century French comedy by any plan or with any eye to transladaptation. I had been approached by Chicago Shakespeare Theater to come up with a new version of Feydeau’s great 20th-century farce A Flea In Her Ear and, eager to do that, I brushed up my rusty French so that I could work from Feydeau’s text instead of translations. That show went well and Classic Stage Company in New York then approached me to work on a drama by Yasmina Reza (of Art fame) called A Spanish Play. The production included Zoe Caldwell and John Turturro, so I said yes more or less just to be in the room. Both the Feydeau and the Reza play were fairly straightforward translation jobs — though needless to say each of them presented questions about style and diction that I had to address. But my version in either case adhered pretty closely to the original.
Then Michael Kahn of Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company sent my agent a copy of Corneille’s 1643 verse comedy The Liar. I hadn’t known the play but fell in love with it instantly. I desperately wanted to tell that story, meet those characters, bring that world to life. This was the beginning of transladaptation because I could see that, in spite of my love for the play, The Liar could not possibly work as written. I needed to take the piece in hand and transform it from what was fundamentally a museum piece to a play for our time. That meant expanding the women’s roles, complicating the plot, making it more economical in terms of production, but above all giving it a voice and a music — and jokes — for today. In other words, I had to turn it into a play of my own, using Corneille the way Shakespeare, I blush to say it, used his own sources as a jumping off point for his comedies. Afterwards, the other three French classical comedies tumbled my way for one reason or another, including The Heir Apparent. But what I now call “transladaptation” was born of practical necessity. I had to invent it as I went along.
How do you see this work fitting into your varied skills as a playwright, including short comic plays, full-length dramatic work, and adaptations of musical books?
Every line you write as a playwright is useful in one sense and useless in another. Useful because you learn something more about dialogue or the character speaking it. Useless because, as Moss Hart said, “You never really learn how to write a play. You only learn how to write this play.” Certainly, shortening and adapting 33 musicals from various decades into staged concert musicals for New York’s Encores series was great training for these French plays because I structure the French comedies like musicals: there are passages of “book” and then longer solos and duets (and variety numbers, like Crispin’s impersonations in The Heir Apparent). I hate to repeat myself in what I do, so you might notice that each of these French comedies, though they’re all from the 17th or 18th century and in verse, is very different in setting, substance, and tone. I guess you could say these plays fit in with everything else I’ve written by having my name on the title page.
You’ve said it only took one reading of Le Légataire universel to know you wanted to work on it. Was there a particular element or moment that sold you on it? What about it were you most excited to tackle?
I liked the play because the plot revolved around not one but two wonderful comic ideas: first Crispin’s impersonation of the heirs and then his impersonation of the uncle. That’s a kind of vaudeville, and a clown part, I was eager to write.
How did you determine that iambic pentameter was the right choice for your transladaptations, rather than sticking with the alexandrine or using another form?
I can’t say I had much choice: iambic pentameter — ten syllables per line in short-long iambic meter — is the music of choice for English poetry from Chaucer onward because it’s a compression of our natural speech, a concentrated version of English conversation. You’ll sometimes find pentameter in Frost so natural that you’d almost think it’s prose. (That last sentence was two lines of iambic pentameter.) The French alexandrine, which is twelve syllables, is too long for our language and tires the English- or American-speaking ear. The more crucial choice facing me when I started these plays was whether I should use verse at all, and whether to use rhyming couplets, which are famously jogtrot and artificial in English. But a) French classical comedies without verse or rhymes turn into sitcom episodes and b) the comedy gets more pointed by the use of rhyme if you use it well and c) I loved the challenge as well as the adventure of working in couplets.
Can you talk about the rhymes? In writing rhyming couplets, how do you go about finding the rhyme? Do you start from the rhyming pair and work backwards, or find the right rhymes as you go?
I wish I knew. If I thought about it I might never rhyme again. Sometimes a rhyme comes out of the material. Sometimes it comes out of the blue. Sometimes you work backwards from the second rhyme. But I always write a prose version of the dialogue before turning it into couplets. That way I know the substance of what the characters are saying and am then free to play.
You wrote that you worked to mirror Regnard’s “restless inventiveness and tumbling action,” and that this led you to expand certain roles, set pieces, and the ending. How did you make the choices about where to depart and where to remain faithful?
Everything in a farce-like play like this is dictated by plot rather than character. So I took this plot and outlined it with index cards just the way you do a musical, then moved the plot-pieces I thought were in the wrong place, adding in cards for scenes that became necessary with special cards for big speeches that would help expand or enrich or keep alive a character. Regnard would certainly recognize his play were he to show up at a performance because the general shape and characters are the same. Other elements, he would quickly notice, have changed. For example, he tied up the marriage plot a third of the way through and played out the inheritance plot. I kept them both going to the very end. In his play the uncle does not undergo a transformation of any kind (characters in French classical comedies tend to adhere to their “type”). Regnard also more or less stopped the action rather than wrapping things up by tying all the story ribbons in bows.
What is your process when it comes to the use of anachronism? The characters in The Heir Apparent reference blimps, Tennessee, Drano, and all manner of other things that did not exist in 1708. Do you consider anything fair game, since the language is modern vernacular, or do you set rules about which anachronisms can be deployed and when?
The rules don’t get set beforehand. They get made organically, as you work. I’m certainly aware of using anachronisms as I go along. If there’s any rule, it’s that they can’t take over the play or else they become cute. But the occasional anachronism does momentarily tie us and our day to this play and 1708, and remind us that They were Us, the very same human stuff with the equivalent of Tennessee and Drano in their lives under other names.
How does the translation process work with the new verse form and the rhymes? Do you translate directly into these forms, or work literally and then mold your translation into the meter?
The process is always the same: I read the original text over and over every day for about three months, taking many pages of notes. Then I always translate the original play literally into prose to see what’s there and then do another prose version including my own scenes. Then I start versifying. That usually takes another three months.
Is there anything else you would like to share about this play or the work of transladaptation?
I had great fun working on this play — partly because Regnard himself was such good company, so humane and so vivacious a spirit. Let’s remember it’s he who first imbued this story with life and first spun some of its comic inventions. In this case I had the good fortune to see The Heir Apparent done first in a superb production in D.C. directed by Michael Kahn and then with different actors and a different director in New York, where I could rewrite and sharpen. With verse and with a verse comedy, it was a great luxury. Enjoy it.
The Heir Apparent is onstage at the Lantern November 8 through December 16, 2018. Visit our website for tickets and information.
