Mark Twain play finally gets produced
HELLEY FISHER FISHKIN opened a file drawer at the University of California’s Bancroft Library in Berkeley, where the largest collection of Mark Twain’s papers is archived. She was researching a project on racial themes in his work, and was not thrilled to find the drawer crammed with Twain plays she had not yet read and didn’t care to.
Those she already knew were dreary at best. “Colonel Sellers,” though a huge hit in New York in 1874, was pilloried by reviewers as “a wretched thing” and “excessively thin.” The Bret Harte collaboration “Ah Sin” was even worse: a cringe-inducing ethnic comedy and, unpardonably, a flop. Twain told its opening-night audience in 1877 that the play had improved each time the producer trimmed it, and that “it would have been one of the very best plays in the world if his strength had held out so that he could cut the whole of it.”
Still, Dr. Fishkin, who is a professor of English and the director of American studies at Stanford, decided (as she later put it) to eat her scholarly spinach and plow through the mess. The materials were filed chronologically, so it took a while before she got to a late comedy called “Is He Dead?” It was not exactly a discovery; the title had turned up in the occasional academic note or reference. But the play itself had never been performed or published or even, to judge from the condition of the manuscript, much perused.
And so, on a winter day in late 2001, Dr. Fishkin, expecting another fizzle from the period generally seen by scholars as the grim denouement of Twain’s brilliant life and career, instead found herself laughing out loud at the library tables.
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Those she already knew were dreary at best. “Colonel Sellers,” though a huge hit in New York in 1874, was pilloried by reviewers as “a wretched thing” and “excessively thin.” The Bret Harte collaboration “Ah Sin” was even worse: a cringe-inducing ethnic comedy and, unpardonably, a flop. Twain told its opening-night audience in 1877 that the play had improved each time the producer trimmed it, and that “it would have been one of the very best plays in the world if his strength had held out so that he could cut the whole of it.”
Still, Dr. Fishkin, who is a professor of English and the director of American studies at Stanford, decided (as she later put it) to eat her scholarly spinach and plow through the mess. The materials were filed chronologically, so it took a while before she got to a late comedy called “Is He Dead?” It was not exactly a discovery; the title had turned up in the occasional academic note or reference. But the play itself had never been performed or published or even, to judge from the condition of the manuscript, much perused.
And so, on a winter day in late 2001, Dr. Fishkin, expecting another fizzle from the period generally seen by scholars as the grim denouement of Twain’s brilliant life and career, instead found herself laughing out loud at the library tables.
Related Links
NYT Review of the play