Texas Pages

By MICHAEL KUCHWARA
Associated Press

NEW YORK — Mark Twain is a name not usually associated with Broadway, unless he is being portrayed by Hal Holbrook, the actor responsible for the one-man show “Mark Twain Tonight!”
But now a play by Twain called “Is He Dead?” — adapted by David Ives — will receive its world premiere Nov. 29 on Broadway, producers Bob Boyett, Roger Berlind and Daryl Roth announced Tuesday. Preview performances begin Nov. 8 at the Lyceum Theatre.
“Is He Dead?” was written by Twain in 1898 but was never performed. It was rediscovered in 2002 by Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin, an English professor and director of the American Studies Program at Stanford University. It was published the following year by the University of California Press.
The plot concerns a group of starving artists who stage the death of their mentor in an effort to increase the value of his work.
“Is He Dead?” is “set in France in the 1840s and centers on the French painter Jean-Francois Millet, who probably was the most beloved European painter in the United States in Twain’s lifetime,” Fishkin said in a telephone interview. “Americans were absolutely obsessed with him, in part because he focused on the dignity of the common man and the common woman. ... I think Twain identified with Millet’s respect for ordinary people.”
According to Fishkin, “Is He Dead?” is “a satire about how value is created in the art world. It’s a farce that remarkably Twain wrote as he was coming out of the one of the deepest depressions of his life.”
The themes of friendship, overcoming adversity and the nature of gender — what it means to be a woman or a man — also are included in the play, she said. “Is He Dead?” ruminates on the question of authenticity, Fishkin said — “what does it mean to be the real thing versus the imitation, a theme that Twain certainly was concerned with because he was often pondering whether he was destined to become an imitation of himself.”
The Broadway production will star Norbert Leo Butz, a Tony winner for his performance in the musical “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” It will be directed by Michael Blakemore, who won two Tonys in 2000 for his direction of a play (“Copenhagen”) and a musical (the revival of “Kiss Me, Kate”).
Fishkin discovered a copy of “Is He Dead?” in a file cabinet at the Bancroft Library at the University of California-Berkeley.
“I found myself approaching it with skepticism because I had read other plays by Twain which were not very good — he was famous for not having talent in this direction,” Fishkin said. “On the other hand, I found myself laughing out loud in the archives of the Bancroft Library. The Twain that I loved was coming out in this very unexpected place.”
A mutual friend introduced Fishkin to Boyett, who then brought Ives, author of such plays as “All in the Timing” and “Polish Joke,” into the project.
“Twain’s words are still there,” Fishkin said. “David Ives did what Twain hoped someone would do (in reconstructing it). He tightened it, adapted it for today’s stage. Twain knew someone was going to have to have to do something with the last act, but Ives still has kept it very much in the spirit of what Twain wrote.”