The World According to Ives features four short plays by David Ives, an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist perhaps best known for his comic one-act plays.

The four plays include:

• Mere Mortals, which eavesdrops on three construction workers on lunch hour as they share increasingly amazing secrets - all while perched on a girder 50 stories up.
• The Universal Language, which brings together Dawn, a young woman with a stutter, and Don, the creator and teacher of Unamunda, a wild comic language. After their lesson sends them into a dazzling display of hysterical verbal pyrotechnics, their relationship begins to change.
• The Philadelphia, which features a young man at a restaurant where he has fallen into a “Philadelphia,” a Twilight Zone-like state in which he cannot get anything he asks for.
• Sure Thing, in which two people meet in a cafe and find their way through a conversational minefield as an offstage bell interrupts their false starts, gaffes and faux pas on their way to finding love.

Performances will take place in the Joe B. Rushing Center for the Performing Arts Mainstage.