David Ives: My Broadway Collaboration with Mark Twain
When the production team of Is He Dead? needed an adapter to trim and shape Mark Twain's original script before the play's Broadway debut, they smartly tapped David Ives, best-known for the aptly titled theatrical evening All in the Timing. This versatile playwright, whose credits include the comedies Mere Mortals and Polish Joke and adaptations of 19 classic musicals for the City Center Encores! series, understands how to make something funny onstage—and, critics agree, he's done himself and Twain proud with Is He Dead?, one of Broadway.com's five best shows of 2007. On a more serious note, Ives is the author is the new drama New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza, now in previews at Classic Stage Company in a production starring Richard Easton, David Garrison and Fyvush Finkel. Broadway.com asked Ives to describe the unique process of "collaborating" with one of America's most celebrated writers.
Mark Twain would have loved the irony.
For now we have Is He Dead?, a new play by the very dead but is he dead? Mark Twain, making its world premiere on Broadway 97 years after the eminent writer's reported demise. The handwritten manuscript of this madcap comedy sat in a filing cabinet for a hundred-odd years until a Twain scholar named Shelley Fisher Fishkin fished it out. Twain would have loved the irony of premiering at the Lyceum Theatre long after he'd famously said that the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. Twain would have loved the irony of having failed as a playwright during his lifetime, only to make it in the theatrical big time while playing the cloud circuit. Maybe he planted the manuscript in that filing cabinet for one final joke and a posthumous annuity.
My own involvement with this project started a couple of years ago, when a producer by the name of Bob Boyett called me up. Yet it does not do Bob Boyett full justice to call him "a producer." The great goodhearted patron, the Maecenas of contemporary American theater is more like it. Bob told me about this recently unearthed Twain play called Is He Dead? He said the play was funny but needed some help. Would I read it and think about providing that help?
Was he kidding? How many times does one get the chance to collaborate with Mark Twain?
By an odd coincidence, when I took Bob's call I had just returned from a week beside an Adirondack lake during which my reading material was none other than…Mark Twain. Indeed, it was The Portable Twain, a veritable two-pound brickload of Twain. By yet another coincidence, I had for years carried my keys on a Mark Twain keychain given me by Henry Gibson on the opening night of A Connecticut Yankee, a musical I adapted for City Center's Encores! series. So Bob's phone call looked like more than fate. It looked as if the twain, contrary to popular belief, might actually meet.
First by conflating some characters and cutting some others I reduced the cast to a more manageable—i.e., more producible—size. Twain's original play has 35-odd people onstage; I brought that down to 11. I changed the play from three acts to two. Keeping as much of Twain's text as I could, I interleaved a number of new scenes that developed some of his characters and I slipped in a subplot or two or three. I wrapped the play up differently than the original, as Twain let all of his characters dwindle rather than scramble toward the necessary farcical denouement. Through all this, I saw my job as doing what Twain himself would have done to the play had he lived another 97 years.
The skeptical might say: So what? Why a Mark Twain play at this late date? Who cares?
The funny thing about Mark Twain is that, if you're an American, you're a creature of Twain whether you've read a word of him or not. That's because Twain helped make the modern American world. Which is to say, he helped make us. Come to know Twain, and you approach knowing something about yourself.
Twain not only "created American humor," as literary types like to say. He created a couple of kinds of American humor that are still with us: on the one hand, the chatty, anecdotal, folksy kind that got carried up through Will Rogers to Garrison Keillor; on the other hand, the more savage, satirical, sometimes downright cynical humor of Twain's later years, which can still be heard any night of the week out of the mouths of our late-night talk-show hosts. You'll find both kinds of humor in full bloom in Is He Dead?
Mark Twain also told us—no, he showed us—how we Americans talk. David Mamet continues this mission and tradition today. Twain gave us a model of how to write prose that is as direct and fresh as, well, Fresh Direct.
Mark Twain, in short, gave us a point of view from which we're still looking at things. It's a POV that's wary of title or public place, positively acid about politics and politicians, and warmly appreciative if sometimes coolly apprehensive about the so-called common man. Twain is a man whose eyes you can't pull any wool over. He'll see straight through any 10 layers of your thickest wool, and tell you what he's seeing in words you won't forget. This is, after all, a man who made eternal gold out of a kid on a raft.
If you don't believe me, or even if you do believe me, amble on down to 45th Street and see and hear for yourself. Sometime during the performance, take a moment to glance around to the back of the theater. You might spot a man in a white suit and a bushy moustache, and it won't be me.
I've heard for years that the Lyceum Theatre was haunted. Now I know by whom.