Notes provided by Dramaturg Elizabeth Williamson.

In 1898 Mark Twain was going through one of the hardest periods in his life. He was bankrupt after making unfortunate investments, and his youngest daughter had died two years earlier of meningitis.  He and his family had moved to Vienna in 1897, so that his daughter Clara could study music there, and Twain was drawn into the theatrical world which, at that point, was at the heart of Viennese society.

Twain had written several previous plays, but only one had done well in performance. Colonel Sellers, the adaptation of Twain’s first novel, had been a great success of a sort very like Twain’s personal success on the lecture circuit: it centered on one very funny character  who could hold the house the entire evening. As Arthur Miller has written, Twain’s early lecture circuits, on which he built his career, were pure performance on his part. None of his attempts at stage plays, after Colonel Sellers, however, had been at all successful.  

As he was looking for work that would pull him out of the financial hole he was in in the late 1890s, Twain’s thoughts may well have turned to Jean-François Millet, a fellow artist who was very well-known for having lived in extreme poverty all his life, whose paintings, ironically, had sold for enormous sums once he was no longer alive to profit from them.

Millet was extremely popular in America in the late 19th Century – Bostonians were among the first to realize his importance and collect him. Several young Boston painters studied with him long before he was much celebrated in France, and on their return to Boston they told collectors about him, so that a visit to Millet’s studio became a necessary part of any Bostonian’s visit to Paris. Interestingly, Millet was celebrated early on by the members of the Saturday Club, an illustrious circle of Boston’s arbiters of taste – and a group that Twain was desperate to be recognized by in his early career.  

Millet’s work, which had been seen in France as potentially revolutionary in its celebration of the worker, and even seemed very brutal to Parisian eyes unused to seeing farm laborers at work, was understood in America as beautifully pastoral. He was adopted with fervor first by Boston, and then by the entire country, so that by the 1890s his paintings were almost as oft-reproduced and hung in as many drawing rooms as Monet’s Water Lilies are now.  The story (greatly exaggerated) of his poverty and indebtedness was widely known in America, through accounts written by his former students after his death in 1875.  

After his death, his work sold at fantastic prices. His Angelus became one of the most famous paintings in the world when, years after Millet’s death, it was the subject of an unprecedented bidding war between American and French collectors, and was bought by an American for the amazing sum of $111,000, though it was bought back from America by the French government in 1890. The painting which Millet had sold for a very modest 1800 francs (approximately $360 dollars at the time) was, fifteen years after his death, a French national treasure that could not be left in a collection outside his home country.

In 1893, Twain had written a short story called “Is He Living or Is He Dead?” in which he had laid out the basic premise which he developed five years later into the play: Jean-François Millet, France’s greatest painter, is starving, deeply in debt and cannot sell a painting to save his life. One of his students suggests that if he were only dead he would instantly be acknowledged a great master, and his work would be worth a fortune – so why not fake his death, and make the money they so desperately need?

Excited by the Viennese theatre world, Twain decided to try his hand at a new play, using this story as his starting point.  HisIs He Dead? was written in a month, and was soon announced for production simultaneously in New York and London. However, the productions never materialized. Bram Stoker, of Dracula fame, was representing it in London, but Twain was disappointed by Stoker’s lukewarm response after reading the play. Stoker encouraged him that it might do better with an American audience, and the play did raise some interest in New York, but not enough to lead to an American premiere either.  

Perhaps the plot, which treats Millet lightly, as the center of a mad farce, took too many liberties with the Great Man for the public’s approval. Perhaps the large cast (originally well over twenty) gave producers pause. But its similarity to the great hit farce of the early 1890’s, Charley’s Aunt, which is dependent on the same major plot device, may well have been its greatest problem; Is He Dead?may have been too close in plot to be a success with audiences over-familiar with its forbearer, which had played for years in London and New York, and run extensive tours as well.  Twain himself felt the play could use improvement, that although there was something good in it, it could use re-dramatizing.  In 1899 he wrote as much, concluding “I know, quite well, that the play will never play until it is reconstructed.”  

Happily, a little over a century after Twain abandoned hopes of getting Is He Dead? produced, it got that chance. Twain scholar Shirley Fisher Fishkin (of Stanford University) was going through the Twain archives at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, and came upon the manuscript. She felt that, unlike the other of Twain’s plays she had read,Is He Dead? was eminently worthy of production, but that Twain was right and it could use some re-working. She then sent it to Broadway producer Bob Boyett, who sent it to David Ives, best-known for his farce All In the Timing, to ask if he would consider adapting it for production on Broadway.  Ives jumped at the chance – as he writes, “How many times does one get the chance to collaborate with Mark Twain?"

 

 

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"You need three things in the theater - the play, the actors, and the audience, - and each must give something."
~
Kenneth Haigh

 

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