Sure Thing David Ives Analysis

As you may well know, you do not get many second chances in life, and when they do come around most, if not all, people jump on that chance. But, in David Ives’ “Sure Thing” the main characters get multiple second chances to make the right “first” impression. All the second chances that happen gives this play a comical feeling. The second and minor character, Betty, plays a pivotal role in “Sure Thing” that helps further the plot with their actions with Bill, the main character, and helps develop the plays main theme of second chances. This is done by Betty and how she reacts to Bill and his attempts at making a conversation and her use of witty dialogue. Without Betty, the play would lose its comical style and would practically be nothing

This use of comedy is the main element in this play that helps reinforce this topic. This comedy reveals the difficulty of starting up a relationship and meeting a new person with the first conversation. And with the bell dinging every time Bill messes up it takes him multiple attempts to get it right, and by the end of the play he finally manages to get a movie date with Betty. Leah Green best describes this as “when one character makes a blunder that would possibly end the encounter, the bell rings and the scene is reset, giving the character an opportunity to correct the

She is just as important as Bill; the reason being is because of the way she reacts to Bill. For example, throughout the play Betty expresses different types of emotion and at one point even anger. During this burst of anger Betty asks why he was interested in her, she then assumes that all Bill wants is to have sexual intercourse to which she then starts the longest rant in the entire play the lasts 12 lines “Betty: Maybe you're only interested for the sake of making small talk long enough to ask me back to your place to listen to some music, or because you've just rented this great tape for your VCR, or because you've got this terrific unknown Django Reinhardt record, only all you really want to do is screw…None of which interests me, mister!” (608). Betty also gets annoyed at Bill several times which cause the conversation to restart, for example, when Bill tries to introduce himself while she is reading a book, she dismisses him almost immediately. But throughout the play, it is mostly Bill who messes up and restarts the conversation. Also, Bills personality changes in almost every conversation they have, this is so he can say the right things and not be offensive towards Betty. Ives’ makes it so that we do not know if all the things Bill says are true or not. For example, Bill says at one point that he is married and at another he says he has a