Mark Twain's never-performed play gets premiere on Broadway

Master American novelist and satirist Mark Twain turns his attention to the manipulation of art prices in his play Is He Dead? soon to debut on Broadway.

Although the man who coined the phrase "rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated" has been dead since 1910, his play will have its world premiere on Nov. 29.

It will open at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway, in a version adapted by David Ives.

Twain wrote Is He Dead? in 1898, but it was never performed.

Instead, it languished in a filing cabinet at the Bancroft Library at the University of California-Berkeley until 2002, when Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin of Stanford University found it.

At first, she didn't know if it would be worth publishing, because Twain was not noted for his playwriting abilities.

"I found myself laughing out loud in the archives of the Bancroft Library. The Twain that I loved was coming out in this very unexpected place," Fishkin said.

Thesatirist who wrote Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer has turned his wit on the art world in the play, which has the remarkably contemporary theme of how values are set for works of art.

Set in France in the 1840s, Is He Dead? follows a group of starving artists who stage the death of their mentor in an effort to boost the value of his work.

It centres on French painter Jean-Francois Millet, "who probably was the most beloved European painter in the United States in Twain's lifetime," Fishkin said.

"Americans were absolutely obsessed with him, in part because he focused on the dignity of the common man and the common woman … I think Twain identified with Millet's respect for ordinary people," she said.

"It's a farce that, remarkably, Twain wrote as he was coming out of one of the deepest depressions of his life."

Twain had been pondering his own legacy, she said.

"What does it mean to be the real thing versus the imitation — [that's] a theme that Twain certainly was concerned with because he was often pondering whether he was destined to become an imitation of himself."

The play will star Norbert Leo Butz, who won a Tony Awardfor his role in themusical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and is being directed by Michael Blakemore, who directed Copenhagen.