The following review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Mark Dawidziak.

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BOOK REVIEW

Twain, Mark. _Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts_. Edited with Foreword,
Afterword, and Notes by Shelley Fisher Fishkin; illustrations by Barry
Moser. Text established by The Mark Twain Project, Bancroft Library.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 244 pages including three
wood engravings and 12 black-and-white photographs. $24.95. ISBN
0-520-23979-2.

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

Mark Dawidziak
[log in to unmask]
_Cleveland Plain Dealer_
Cleveland, Ohio

Copyright (c) 2003 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.


Mark Twain, like Charles Dickens before him, could not resist the lure of
the stage. Like Dickens, he made several attempts to establish himself as a
playwright. Like Dickens, he repeatedly met with disappointment.

And, intriguingly enough, like Dickens, he did receive a great measure of
acclaim in theatrical circles, but as a wildly popular platform performer,
not as a playwright.

As one play after another failed even to get produced, Twain playfully
entertained the possibility that he was a lousy playwright. "The greatest
of all the arts is to write a drama," he declared in 1900. "It is a most
difficult thing. It requires the highest talent possible and the rarest
gifts. No, there is another talent that ranks with it--for anybody can
write a drama--I had 400 of them--but to get one accepted requires real
ability. And I have never had that felicity yet."

Was he right? Well, little to contradict this conclusion can be found in
_Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts_, a curious mess of a play that Twain
wrote in 1898. Judge for yourself. The comedy has been extracted from the
Mark Twain Papers in Berkeley by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, whose provocative
works on the writer include _Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and
African-American Voices_ and _Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections
on Mark Twain and American Culture_.

Published in a handsome edition by the University of California Press, _Is
He Dead?_ is dreary proof of what Twain ultimately suspected about himself
as a writer--that perhaps he lacked the tools to be a first-rate
playwright. Indeed, he did. But that does not necessarily make _Is He
Dead?_ dreary reading for a theater student, a Twain devotee or even a
casual fan. What you get out of this volume largely will depend on how you
approach it, and, yes, the work demands to be evaluated from several
perspectives.

First and foremost, _Is He Dead?_ must be considered an important
contribution to literary scholarship in general and Twain studies in
particular. This is decidedly third-rate Twain, but what of it? No work by
Mark Twain is uninteresting or unimportant, after all, so anything he wrote
should prove fascinating reading from a purely literary standpoint.

If we recovered a largely unknown and inferior play by Tennessee Williams,
would it be of interest? Would its publication be almost a sacred duty? You
bet your jumping frog it would. Even the failures of a genius command our
attention.

Working with a text established by the incomparable Mark Twain Project team
in Berkeley, Fishkin has gone beyond the previous researchers who gave
slight notice to the play and has endeavored to bring it to public
attention.  And as the line goes from Arthur Miller's _Death of a
Salesman_, "attention must be paid."  So the student of literature, as well
as theater, has much to mull over here. For better or worse, this is a
complete work by Mark Twain, folks, and those don't pull into town on the
noon stage every day.

From the purely Twainian standpoint, _Is He Dead?_ is still more
fascinating. The Twain buff can and should have a jolly time reading the
play, noticing along the way how many distinct echoes there are of previous
works. Liberally "borrowing" from himself, Twain pulls out the humorous
description of the "long, low dog" (the dachshund) from _Following the
Equator_ . He appropriates the pungent idea of limburger cheese being
mistaken for a rotting corpse from "The Invalid's Story." He repeats the
routine of vague and perplexing answers from "An Encounter with an
Interviewer." He resurrects jokes from "His Grandfather's Old Ram" in
_Roughing It_. He lifts the device of the story's hero watching his own
funeral from _Tom Sawyer_. And on and on goes the game of "spot the
influences." In fact, the entire play is based on his 1893 short story, "Is
He Living or Is He Dead?" In this tale, we are told how French artist
Jean-Francois Millet faked his own death, knowing that unknown painters
often become hot items after they are dead. Sure enough, the lionized
Millet becomes "posthumously" rich and famous.

All of these associations are wonderfully detailed in Fishkin's insightful
foreword and afterword material, which provide splendid background on "Mark
Twain and the Theatre," "Mark Twain and Art," the real Millet's life and
career, the play's many associations to other Twain works, the theater of
Twain's day, and Twain's attempts to get _Is He Dead?_ produced.

The Twainiac will find Fishkin's illuminating essays as valuable as the
play itself. They provide all the necessary context for approaching and
appreciating the comedy about Millet and his artist friends. You may not
agree with Fishkin on the quality of the play, but you can't help being
impressed by the thoroughness of her research and the vitality of her
writing. As elegant as Fishkin's prose are the original illustrations by
woodcut engraver Barry Moser, the Pennyroyal Press proprietor whose work
graced the 100th anniversary edition of _Huckleberry Finn_ published by the
University of California Press in 1985.

Twain said he wrote the play for fun, and that's precisely how a Twain
aficionado should read it. Some of the lines are vintage Twain. There are
several nifty phrasings ("O, shucks! you don't know as much as an
art-critic," one of the starving artists says to another). And the writer
manages to sneak in a few withering satirical blasts at the art world,
society and, of course, the French. In many ways, _Is He Dead?_ is a better
play than, say, Twain's miserable attempt to adapt _Tom Sawyer_. There's no
whitewashing the ineptitude of that terribly off-key effort, which, despite
being based on a book the author called "simply a hymn," also demonstrates
Twain's tin ear as a playwright.

But although mildly amusing as a bit of Twain humor, _Is He Dead?_ is a
disaster as a piece of theater--a disaster that completely confirms Twain's
assessment of his talents as a playwright. He was 100 percent correct about
his lack of ability to write a play that "would play." This one wouldn't,
at least not without serious revisions and cuts.

So it is from the theater standpoint that _Is He Dead?_ comes off the
worst. For a literary fellow with a strong sense of the theatrical, the man
has almost no sense of stagecraft. He starts off the play with no less than
ten artists in the "good guy" Millet camp. Ten! He's asking the
unsuspecting theater-goers to keep track of ten artists right off the bat,
and then, while they're desperately consulting their programs, he starts
throwing dozens of new people at them.

The playwright's instinct would have told him he could get by with just
four artists. This would have reduced the number of people for the audience
to follow, focusing the piece and reducing the clutter.

This is what the true playwright would do. Twain at last confessed that he
lacked these instincts, saying, "I judge the trouble is that the literary
man is thinking of the style and quality of the thing, while the playwright
thinks only of how it will play." That's part of the trouble, to be sure.
It's certainly true that few writers of the time thought of the stage as an
outlet for literary endeavors. But it's also true that Twain, "the literary
man," failed to allow for the basic conventions of the theater.

The novelist can rally hordes of soldiers or seething mobs in a few concise
sentences. Twain can't quite leave behind that novelist's advantage in this
department, and it dooms him as a playwright.

Conservatively, you would need at least fifty actors to effectively stage
the play as Twain has written it--and many of them would have to double or
triple up on parts. Pity the poor audience trying to keep everybody
straight in this play.

Think of how many people it would take just to do the Act I scene where the
evil art dealer Andre sets out to spoil the sale of paintings. It begins
with nine artists on stage. Andre arrives with "several" pals, out to
squash every potential deal. We're told there are also "a lot" of
"long-haired young Latin Quarter Artists," along with the chimney sweep,
newsboys, flower girls, peasants, laborers, mechanics, women with bundles.
And that's not to mention Basil Thorpe and the art partons.

What was Twain thinking? He surely wasn't thinking about how to properly
stage a scene for the stage. A director, should he live through the casting
process, would require about 25 people and a traffic cop even to suggest
this scene. And there's your mess of a play.

The novelist summons the entire population of Paris for a scene, putting
them on paper as he chooses. The playwright slashes the most complicated of
proceedings, employing the smallest number of people. And that's just one
example of where Twain proves his theory that he was a failure as a
playwright.

The modern director also would need to wrestle with some uncomfortable
ethnic stereotypes and musty jokes. Some of the humor, without question,
would have been acceptable for the dialect comedians prominent in early
vaudeville, but it's hardly worthy of America's greatest humorist. These
are minor annoyances, however, compared to the play's overall design problems.

Look at _Charley's Aunt_, the 1893 Brandon Thomas play most obviously and
easily mentioned in comparison with _Is He Dead?_ (largely because Millet
dons a dress and wig to impersonate his own sister). Notice how few people
Thomas puts on stage, even though the plot spins farcical contrivance upon
contrivance. The two plays are similar in tone and style, but _Charley's
Aunt_ is a model of efficiency while _Is He Dead?_ is an exercise in futility.

George Bernard Shaw, it has often been said, was no friend to directors,
often constructing scenes calling for a regular army of actors. You
suspect, though, that, given the choice, a director would dash to the most
difficult play by Shaw, a Twain disciple, rather than face the daunting
difficulties posed by _Is He Dead?_.

KISS--keep it simple, stupid--is a good rule in this realm, too. And what
Twain did to Feninmore Cooper as a novelist, a Christopher Durang could do
to him as a playwright. How many writing rules govern the theater? How many
does Twain break?

One need not feel bad for ol' Sam Clemens on this score. As a writer, he
mastered a remarkable array of forms and styles: humor, novels, travel
books, letters, essays, journalism, criticism, speeches. He is permitted a
weak spot or two, and the writing of plays was one of these.

To recap possible reactions, then, the Twain fan and the theater student
should find _Is He Dead?_ entertaining if not riveting; a theater director
should find it bewildering if not bedeviling.

It is, however, a piece of Twain literature and a piece of its time (a
museum piece, one might say), and therefore doubly worthy of discussion and
dissection. But it isn't proof that Twain possessed the ability to write a
play.

Mark Twain frequently returned to the notion that experience was an
"author's most valuable asset." He voiced this opinion many times and in
many ways, but never more succinctly than in the following eight words:
"Supposing is good, but finding out is better." Twain sometimes supposed
that he had the "write stuff" to be a successful playwright. Experience
taught him better.

Our affection for Mark Twain leaves us hoping that one day proof will be
found to reverse this conclusion. _Is He Dead?_ isn't it.

_____

Mark Dawidziak is the TV critic for the _Cleveland Plain Dealer_; he is
also a playwright and the director of Northwest Ohio's Largely Literary
Theater Company. His eight published books include _Mark My Words: Mark
Twain on Writing and Horton Foote's The Shape of the River: The Lost
Teleplay About Mark Twain_.