“Sure Thing” is a short romantic comedy written by the American playwright David Ives. It debuted at Manhattan Punch Line’s Festival of One-Act Comedies in 1988. This play was one part of Ives’ collection of six short plays called All in the Timing which premiered Off-Broadway in 1993, and ran for over six hundred performances. The collection won the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award for Playwriting. It was published in 1994, and revived at Primary Stages in 2013.
The play takes place in a cafe, with two characters: Bill and Betty. Betty is reading a book when Bill enters the cafe, asks her if the seat across from her is taken, and tries to strike up a conversation. As the play progresses, every time one of them makes a mistake in the conversation, a bell rings. Then they get to stop and begin again from where it went wrong. They perform several iterations of each topic, in which their identities continually shift to say the right thing. Ultimately, their personalities and language converge to create a happy ending.
Ives said that “Sure Thing” was inspired by his "stairway thoughts," which he defined as "what you think of on the stairs going down and realize you should have said." He said the play began as a quick idea jotted down in a notebook: "Two people stand at a bus stop. All the possible things they could say if somebody asks, 'Does this bus go to (blank)?' " He changed the bus stop to a cafe, because it would be more romantic and the actors wouldn’t have to stand. Ives explained, "The bell I threw in there as a stop-gap until I could think of something better, but then I got to like it."
“Sure Thing” is both comic and philosophical. Through repetition, it exposes how identity, including class and gender, is constructed through language, and how this, in turn, creates opportunity. In a very compact fifteen-minute play, it touches on important issues in the philosophy of language: iterability, performance, labeling, and genre. It engages in satire of social conformity and explores the roles of time and chance in the development of relationships. Language both destroys and creates Bill and Betty’s futures. Ultimately, “Sure Thing” has a romantic, if wry, sensibility—it wants Bill and Betty to live happily ever after, even if they have to become completely different people to leave the cafe together.
