All in the Timing: The One-Act Play Festival

The world according to David Ives is a very odd 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 original evening of theatre includes plays titled “Sure Thing,” “Words, Words, Words,” “The Universal Language,” “Variations on the Death of Trotsky,” “The Philadelphia,” and “Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread.”