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TheaterFebruary 2008 Never the Twain by Brooke Allen On the revival of Mark Twain's Is He Dead?, the Steppenwolf production of August: Osage County, and the return to Broadway of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming forty years after its debut. One of the most potentially exciting events of the theatrical season was the premiere of Mark Twain’s lost comedy Is He Dead? After all, how often does a full-length work by an artist of Twain’s caliber come to light after more than a century? The manuscript of this unproduced piece was discovered in 2002 among the Mark Twain papers at U.C. Berkeley by a literary scholar, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who arranged for the manuscript to be published and suggested to the producer Bob Boyett that the play, a lightweight cross-dressing farce, would do well on Broadway. Doctored up by the successful commercial playwright David Ives, it opened on December 9, 108 years after it was written, to all but rapturous reviews. I set off to the theater convinced that it was going to be a perfect evening. How could the great Twain, the adroit Ives, and the brilliant director Michael Blakemore go wrong? ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 February 2008, on page 39 Copyright © 2009 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/never-the-twain-3760
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by Brooke Allen On Enter Laughing: The Musical at the York Theatre, The Savannah Disputation at Playwrights Horizons, 33 Variations at Eugene O'Neill Theater, and the closing of Forbidden Broadway. On Jude Law in Hamlet, the Atlantic Theater Company's Two Unrelated Plays by David Mamet, Collaborative Stages's House of Yes, and The Retributionists by Daniel Goldfarb. On After Luke & When I Was God at the Irish Repertory Theater, New York, A Lifetime of Burning at e59e, New York & The Bacchae in Central Park. On A Midsummer Night's Dream at Shakespeare on the Sound and The Europeans at Atlantic Stage 2.  The New Criterion is now optimized for Mobile Devices 
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