More than 100 years after it was written, Twain's comedy has arrived on Broadway. Photograph: AP
It' s one thing for Broadway to host plays by Tom Stoppard (Rock'n'Roll), Conor McPherson (The Seafarer), and David Mamet (the political comedy November, currently in previews), but it's quite another to find 'a new comedy' by Mark Twain in a crowded non-musical market. Given that it was Twain who famously remarked that a report of his death was "an exaggeration", there is something particularly apt about the title of his 1898 comedy Is He Dead?, exhumed by the Stanford University scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin in 2002. Is the play at the Lyceum theatre a lost masterwork? Not by some measure, and British audiences may be particularly nonplussed by a text trading on various pantomime conventions. There's even a resident baddie, a slimy moneylender played by Byron Jennings, who is booed on cue at the curtain call.
Twain apparently wrote the play to mark his emergence from bankruptcy; its wafer-thin plot hangs on a painter's attempts to solve his own financial crises in a rather unusual manner. The artist is Frenchman Jean-François Millet, who we find living in penury in 1846 Paris. How to improve the painter's fortunes? Easy: fake his death, thereby driving up the value of his canvases. The demands of the plot soon find Norbert Leo Butz's Millet disappearing from view, only to re-emerge - curls, corsets and all - as the late Millet's mad, manic twin sister, a widow whose growly voice won't surprise anyone weaned on panto. Or, for that matter, those familiar with a better-known repertory staple, the Brandon Thomas farce Charley's Aunt.
Long stretches of Twain's play - as tweaked by American dramatist David Ives - are pretty tough going. It takes all director Michael Blakemore's legerdemain to sustain us through two shortish acts that allow designer Peter J Davison to unveil two hugely arresting sets: Millet's high-ceilinged, painting-filled studio and, after the interval, the elegant urban splendour to which the same character has ascended as a result of his elaborate cross-dressing ruse. Blakemore long ago cut his comic-theatrical teeth on the original London and New York productions of Noises Off, a Michael Frayn mainstay that exposes the comparative rustiness of the cogs in the Twain/Ives machine. But the ensemble playing is of the uncharacteristically high order that seems to be marking out the current Broadway season, as the New York Times noted .
Alas, recent grosses suggest - and hardly for the first time - that audiences may not think the play is quite the find that some critics do. Or, at least, that too many Broadway plays at the moment are chasing too limited a New York public. That's the view expressed to me by several producers, who have noted that even Rock'n'Roll, among others, is far from selling out. During the busy holiday week ending December 30 2007, the Twain show played to little more than 50% capacity, while January and February are famously known for dramatic fall-offs in Broadway attendance. On the other hand, should Blakemore's production survive the winter, making it through to the more audience-friendly spring, this trifle of a play may find that it' s been reborn in more ways than one.
