Scenes From a Funeral
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Listening in on one’s own funeral can be good for the ego. Tom Sawyer, whose preadolescent life had no lack of high points, called it “the proudest moment of his life.” The attention and kind words sure are nice, but how do you spend the remaining decades of your life? Especially when folks start grabbing at your padded bra?
That’s the question Mark Twain addressed with “Is He Dead?” in 1898, 22 years after chronicling Tom’s mischievous doings. In this unabashedly old-fashioned and somewhat effortful comedy, now receiving its belated stage premiere at the resourceful hands of director Michael Blakemore, enjoying those tearful goodbyes is a lot harder to do when you’re standing in the same room. In a dress. With two lecherous old coots fighting for your hand, among other body parts.
Taking aim at the herd mentality that still pervades cultural life, Twain contrived a boisterous alternate life for the acclaimed painter Jean-François Millet (“The Gleaners,” “The Angelus”). Here Millet (played by the tireless Norbert Leo Butz) first fakes his own death in order to boost sales of his paintings, then gussies himself up as his own eccentric sister — and, of course, the beneficiary of the artist’s estate. (While Millet was hardly the strapped bohemian that Twain claims, his works did explode in value upon his death in 1875.)
When he wrote “Is He Dead?,” Twain had recently struggled with issues of solvency (he had just emerged from bankruptcy) and mortality (his beloved daughter Susy had died in 1896). Twain had enjoyed intermittent popular (if not always critical) success on the stage in the past, but plans for London and New York productions of “Is He Dead?” quickly ran aground for various reasons. And so the play found itself discarded for more than a century, until a Stanford professor discovered it in a library drawer in 2003.
Enter adapter David Ives, who has performed resuscitations on some two dozen old musicals for Encores! and other concert stagings. Mr. Ives has undertaken a similar duty here, streamlining Twain’s work to two acts from three and eliminating one-third of the characters. In addition to a potent red pen and a sharp ear for period comedy, he has what might be called the courage of his conventions: No stereotype is too shopworn, no situation too obvious, no sight gag too groan-worthy to avoid his attentions.
And so the villainous moneylender Bastien André (Byron Jennings) sports a Mephistophelian Van Dyke and says things such as “I’ll ruin you, do you understand? Ruin you!” The German artist pulls a huge sausage out of his coat pocket and declaims, “The wurst is yet to come,” while the red-bearded Irish artist enters the room to a jig.
Once the scheme of boosting the value of Millet’s art is established in the first scene — “The deader he is, the better he is,” a prospective buyer reports — Mr. Butz spends the rest of “Is He Dead?” in spit curls and petticoats. Posing as his own identical twin sister, the Widow Tillou, Millet swaggers and scratches like a longshoreman, wiping his brow with his own ringlets and engaging in almost Dadaesque conversations with Millet’s baffled friends. Take the cracked exchange in which the Widow discusses the deaths of all seven, nine, or 11 of her children (she can’t remember which):
MADAME CARON: Were they … ?
WIDOW: Boys and girls? Some of them — yes.
MADAME BATHILDE: Some of them? Weren’t they all?
WIDOW: Many thought so.
MADAME CARON: What did you think?
WIDOW: At this late date I couldn’t be certain. Still, I believe there was considerable variety.
This sort of thing had gone over big in 1892, when “Charley’s Aunt” became a global sensation. And if the years haven’t been particularly kind to this vintage of foolishness — not even Mr. Ives’s extensive cuts or Mr. Blakemore’s brisk direction can keep the narrative machinery from wheezing and gasping into action — “Is He Dead?” serves as a heartening reminder that comic ingenuity can make even the hoariest material seem fresh and vibrant.
I am referring not to Twain but to the blessedly disinhibited man at the center of his play. Aside from rickety vehicles written for Carol Burnett (“Moon Over Buffalo”) and Hugh Jackman (“The Boy From Oz”) and an unapologetically old-fashioned revue for Martin Short, Broadway has essentially abandoned the business of providing larger-than-life comic performers with glitzy platforms for them to ply their shameless gifts.
Mr. Butz is the only one of these modern-day vaudevillians to derive his stardom solely from stage work. And in the rather tiresome early scenes, populated with anxious ingénues and those “ethnic” fellow painters, his Millet is the closest thing to a naturalistic character on the stage. But naturalism goes right out the window from the first entrance of the heavily rouged Widow Tillou. This is not a closely parsed realization of one man’s femininity, à la Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie,” nor does it trade too extensively on a guy fumbling his way through girlish behavior (although there’s certainly a decent chunk of that).
Rather, it is a performance focused almost entirely on first locating and then executing as many laughs as possible within every scene, every beat, every head toss and dialogue tweak. It has nothing to do with inner truth and everything to do with the audience, a notion that has become kitchen-sinked and Stanislavskied almost out of existence. (Given some of Mr. Butz’s past excesses in similarly broad roles, it also presumably has quite a bit to do with some discretion on Mr. Blakemore’s part.) Mr. Butz makes it all look very difficult — but worth the effort.
“Charley’s Aunt” continues to be produced in theaters large and small, and based on the current evidence, “Is He Dead?” has nowhere near the narrative confidence of its gender-bending forebear. What it does have is a crisp design by Peter J. Davison (sets) and Martin Pakledinaz (costumes), a cluster of supporting performers willing to score points without overstaying their welcome (Patricia Connolly and Marylouise Burke are joys to behold as a pair of addled spinsters), and an inexhaustible central performance. Reports of this play’s death may have been exaggerated, as long as this caliber of talent is around to give “Is He Dead?” at least a tenuous lease on life.
Open run (149 W. 45th St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-239-6200).