Little-known Twain play glimmers
After nearly a century languishing in a file drawer at a university library in California, Mark Twain’s little-known 1898 play “Is He Dead?” finally made its Broadway debut in 2007.
And now, in a rousing production that opened Friday night, the ever-current Kavinoky Theatre has become the first professional outfit to stage the production since its run in New York ended last year.
Twain’s comedy, which was whittled down from three acts to two and given a bit of modern finesse in David Ives’ adaptation, is probably not destined to become a new classic. It’s slow to start and its humor is not some of Twain’s best (who knew the great writer was so fond of jokes about bodily functions?) but nonetheless succeeds as a much-needed evening of theatrical escape.
The play is a fanciful fictionalization of a hard-knocks time in the life of famed French painter Jean-Francois Millet, who cannot for the life of him unload a single one of his peerless masterpieces for as much as a franc. With help from a devious trio of eccentrics, Millet hatches a plan to increase the value of his paintings by faking his own death and masquerading as Millet’s apocryphal twin sister.
Theater Review
“Is He Dead?”
3 stars
Comedy presented through Feb. 8 in Kavinoky Theatre, 320 Porter Ave. For more information, call 829-7668 or visit www.kavinokytheatre.com.
As in any decent farce, all sorts of stylized hijinks — in drag, no less — ensue.
The Kavinoky’s cast, headed by John Warren as the destitute painter and his feminine alter ego, is superb. Warren has a fine gift for playing the straight man, a skill that becomes only more valuable as he dons a frilly pink dress he wears for the last two-thirds of the production. Millet’s trio of sidekicks is led by a particularly boisterous Norman Sham as the scheming Agamemnon and bolstered by the performances of David Lundy as an impossibly stereotyped German named Hans von Bismark and Joseph Wiens, who plays a similarly caricatured Irishman.
As Papa Leroux, Jim Maloy has the jittery old man character, last seen in American Repertory Theatre’s “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” pegged. Standout performances come also from a campy and sinister Tim Newell as Bastien Andre, Kate Loconti as Marie and Tom Zindle in a variety of roles, up to and including the King of France.
Paul Todaro’s direction is for the most part solid, though the dramatic lighting changes only make Twain’s already jarring and not particularly funny asides more stark. Brian Cavanagh’s lighting design is otherwise impeccable, as are wigs by David Bova, costumes by Dixon
Reynolds, sound by Tom Makar and, especially, lovely period sets by David King.
In the course of the play, glints of Twain’s cutting humor appear, usually at the expense of the French or the effeminate — or, naturally, both.
Were Twain alive today, he would be dismayed to learn that the undervaluation of artists he struggled against in his day is still alive and well. But, on the other hand, Twain would no doubt be pleased to see his play, unloved and unproduced in its day and for a full century afterward, given such a glimmering production in the city he briefly made his home.
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