Abandoned by Mummy and Daddy, 28-year-old brother-and-sister twins Presley and Haley are hollow-eyed poster children for arrested development. Subsisting on various forms of chocolate and sleeping pills, the creepy and unattractively pale duo lead a whiny, childlike existence – that is, until Cosmo Disney, a strutting cabaret performer, and his masked sidekick, Pitchfork Cavalier, enter their lives and expose them to the terror of the outside world.

The world according to David Ives is a very add place, and his plays constitute a virtual stress test of the English language — and of the audience’s capacity for disorientation and delight. Ives’s characters plunge into black holes called “Philadelphias,” where the simplest desires are hilariously thwarted. Chimps named Milton, Swift, and Kafka are locked in a room and made to re-create Hamlet. And a con man peddles courses in a dubious language in which “hello” translates as “velcro” and “fraud” comes out as “freud.”

 

At once enchanting and perplexing, incisively intelligent and side-splittingly funny, this production of Ives’s plays includes “Sure Thing,” “Words, Words, Words,” “The Universal Language,” “Variations on the Death of Trotsky,” “The Philadelphia,” and “Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread.”

“Theater that aerobicizes the brain and tickles the heart…Ives is a mordant comic who has put the play back in playwright.” — Time