To read a play rather than watch it performed is a bit like eating a beef burrito without the accoutrements of salsa, guacamole, or onions. You get the meat of the thing, but it lacks all flair.
The test of this recipe is simple. Have your teenagers read Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” Next, have them watch Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film adaptation of the same play. Then pack some diced onions into those food missiles, slather on the guacamole, douse them in salsa, and serve them up when your kids ask for a second run on Branagh’s movie.
Plays—tragedy, comedy, farce, and all the rest—aren’t novels, written as a dialogue by the author, the reader, and the imagination. Plays are collaborative works aimed at the stage. The director, the actors, the costume and makeup crews, the sets: These are the people and things that breathe life, color, and magic into a playwright’s script. Shakespeare’s soliloquies, speeches, and dialogues are the work of a genius, yes, but he wrote them to be performed in front of a live audience.
Love and Despair
Another Shot at the Stage
“Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts” is the name Twain gave to this work of farce and satire. In her 2003 book by the same title, Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin brings us the script of the play as well as valuable commentary and notes. In her Foreword, she writes of Twain and his family living in 1898 in Vienna, where he wrote “Is He Dead?” Broke after some unwise investments and still grieving the death of his 24-year-old daughter Susy in 1896, Twain spent a dreary autumn in this city before beginning “Is He Dead?”—the writing of which he described as putting him into “immense spirits as soon as my day has started.”
In Print: Negatives and Positives
For many who read this print version, the play will likely seem unremarkable, creaky, and stilted even for its own time. Twain employs centuries-old dramatic devices to carry the action: a feigned death, a heartless villain out only for money, a young woman torn between true love and saving her family from poverty by marrying that villain, Millet’s cross-dressing as he pretends to be his own nonexistent twin sister. There is humor in the dialogue, but as read on the page this will at best bring an occasional chuckle. Finally, Twain populates the stage with so many characters that keeping track of them, especially in the first half of the play, sent me time and again to his “Persons Represented” list.Twain Meets Broadway
“The play’s the thing,” said Hamlet, and in the case of “Is He Dead?” those words ring true.As I noted earlier, words that seem lackluster or clunky in a script can come to life on the stage, given a good director and vibrant actors. In the winter of 2007, nearly five years after Fishkin’s book appeared, “Is He Dead?” finally found the audience dreamed of by the author more than a century ago: “Is He Dead?” appeared on Broadway.
Then he immediately adds, “But with the right doctors, even a long-buried dinosaur can be made to dance.” In the case of this dinosaur, these “resurrection artists,” as Brantley calls them, include “the director Michael Blakemore, the playwright David Ives (who adapted Twain’s script) and an infectiously happy cast, led by the wondrous Norbert Leo Butz, that serves a master class in making a meal out of a profiterole.”
Because of this glittering and enthusiastic talent—Brantley is generous in his praise of nearly all on stage—and the tweaking of Twain’s script, “jokes you would swear you would never laugh at suddenly seem funny.”
A Summing Up
Even if they’ve never read his books, most Americans can at least vaguely identify Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Becky Thatcher. Many also possess some sort of knowledge, however dim or muddled, of the plots of the books in which these characters appear. We can safely assume, however, that the same will never be said of “Is He Dead?”Yet the play will retain a place, however minor, in our literature. Scholars will cherish it, especially as so many scenes and devices hark back to earlier pieces by Twain. They might remember, too, that composing this work breathed new life into Twain’s moribund writing. In the years remaining before his death, he wrote more short stories and essays, and delivered memorable, witty speeches on numerous occasions.
Finally, this play paints a different picture of Twain in his old age than the one commonly accepted—a cynic who had become disillusioned with mankind. As representative of this viewpoint, which Twain’s later writings do indeed reinforce, Fishkin cites Bernard DeVoto, who commented that the older Twain’s dark views depicted “man’s complete helplessness in the grip of the inexorable forces of the universe, and man’s essential cowardice, pettiness and evil.”
And yet, as Fishkin rightly observes, the artists portrayed in “Is He Dead?” are “resourceful, boldly inventive, generous, and good.” The play and its characters give us “a world in which imagination, chutzpah, and collective action trump malevolence and abusive power.”
Somewhere in the man from Hannibal there burned, however faintly, a flicker of faith in humanity.