Great Art Has No Nationality: How Ives Adapts
Daniel Ciba
Abstract
David Ives's adaptation of Mark Twain's unperformed play Is He Dead? recovers a slice of Twain's popular Americana, which would have remained lost in the archives without Ives's skill as a contemporary playwright. Since its Broadway premiere in 2007, Ives’s new version has been performed at many different types of theaters across the United States. What is it about Ives’s revisions that turned a script that had never received a single performance for over a hundred years into a commercially viable play? By examining Ives’s additions, revisions, and deletions, I propose that Ives constructs nationality by supplanting historical context with commercialized American stereotypes and disruptions. This form of erasure, by which Ives deletes the reality of foreign identity, limits his constructions of characters to cartoonish reductions of nationality. After examining how Ives adapts nationality in Is He Dead?, I consider the adaptation of nationality in his translaptations of three French comedies: A Flea in her Ear (2006), The School for Lies (2011), and The Heir Apparent (2011). Although Ives adapts nationality differently based on the different needs of each play, he consistently relies on the reduction of foreignness to stereotype while updating the language and humor with Americanized references.
David Ives's adaptation of Mark Twain's unperformed play Is He Dead? recovers a slice of Twain's popular Americana, which would have remained lost in the archives without Ives's skill as a contemporary playwright. Since its Broadway premiere in 2007, Ives’s new version has been performed at many different types of theaters across the United States. What is it about Ives’s revisions that turned a script that had never received a single performance for over a hundred years into a commercially viable play? By examining Ives’s additions, revisions, and deletions, I propose that Ives constructs nationality by supplanting historical context with commercialized American stereotypes and disruptions. This form of erasure, by which Ives deletes the reality of foreign identity, limits his constructions of characters to cartoonish reductions of nationality. After examining how Ives adapts nationality in Is He Dead?, I consider the adaptation of nationality in his translaptations of three French comedies: A Flea in her Ear (2006), The School for Lies (2011), and The Heir Apparent (2011). Although Ives adapts nationality differently based on the different needs of each play, he consistently relies on the reduction of foreignness to stereotype while updating the language and humor with Americanized references.
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