On the Border

Questioning their existence
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Last updated: Tuesday May 6, 2008, EDT 7:33 AM
BY EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER

When Steve Ives was a student at Fair Lawn High School, a teacher gave him a copy of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." It wasn't on the English class reading list.

Picture: A still from Ives' play, "Bordertown."

"You would really like this," Ives remembers the teacher saying.

Over the next 10 years, it would become his Bible. Ives traveled all over the country, living in his Saturn and taking odd bartending jobs. When he reached the Southwest, he was captivated. There was just something about it that he never experienced growing up in North Jersey.

"It had a certain peculiar romance to it," said Ives, who now lives in New York. "There was almost a mysticism to it, when you're the middle of nowhere, and it's nowhere as far as the eye can see."

The Southwest is the setting for his play, "Bordertown," now playing off-off-Broadway. In a place called Calexico, on the border between California and Mexico, Ives has created the Last Exit Café, a diner that becomes an existential meeting point for a motley crew of characters. All of them, including a young man who was abandoned as a baby, an escaped criminal and a policewoman, have heartbreak in their lives and must decide their fate.

There's even a character who may or may not be God.

"Throughout the play, you have these people whose lives — whether through God or through their own doing — have been sort of brutal," said Ives. "And they have to decide whether to believe or not believe."

Ives has settled — for now, at least — in New York City. But he, like his characters, still constantly questions his existence. His journey is far from over. "I still feel far from my goal," he said.

Ives has written two yet-unsold screenplays with best-selling novelist Jodi Picoult, as well as a collection of poetry and stories for DC Comics. His definition of being successful involves being a novelist.

But "Bordertown" is his first play, and as moments go, this might be the proverbial "it."

"This is the moment where if someday I am or am not a successful writer, I'll still look back on this and think, wasn't it exciting? Wasn't it fun?" he said. "Not knowing what the future is going to be, not knowing whether you were or weren't going to be successful, but having all these people reading your words, playing your characters; and all these people in the audience reacting to them. Maybe that's what it all means."

Many muses

When he's writing, Ives says, he wears his influences on his sleeve. "But because they're really disparate, I think I get away with it," he added. Not many people count among their influences Kerouac, Geoffrey Chaucer — the Bordertown characters each get a monologue in which they tell their stories, as in "The Canterbury Tales" — and Picoult.

"What [Picoult] does is she makes great literature and great fiction simultaneously," said Ives. "I try to do that in 'Bordertown,' to make it literature even though it's theater.

"I try to make the person who comes in to see the play think," he added. "I don't tell them what to think, but I try to get them to do it. That's definitely an influence from Jodi."

Ives isn't shy about citing these influences, and he also isn't too shy to say that he likes powerful women. He's worked on the Wonder Woman comic, and he inserted Hillary Clinton as a cultural reference in "Bordertown" because he admired "something that was cutting-edge sexy about her" in 2003 when he wrote the play.

Clinton wasn't in the news at the time, but "it's become almost ridiculously politically relevant," said Ives. "She's got this power surrounding her."

But relevant or not, successful or not, Ives believes he can change his own fate and that anyone can do the same.

"If people reading can take away anything from my life, it's that it's all possible," he said.

E-mail: shih@northjersey.com