BACKSTORYOf all the near casualties of the stagehands’ strike, Is He Dead? seemed one of the most precarious, in part because Broadway went dark after the show had had just two nights of previews. When it returned on November 29—originally meant to be its opening night—only 330 people showed up. “We had a rough couple of days when we first got back,” says Butz. “We definitely had forgotten some of the rhythms.” During his enforced vacation, Butz mostly “got stuff done around the house” and did read some more Twain. But the extra research time didn’t help—“not with this piece. It’s something you have to learn by doing it. To overanalyze anything about it is to really kill it.”
Is He Dead? may be less of a gamble. On the other hand, it is a Victorian gender-bending farce (Twain’s artist, Jean-François Millet, disguises himself as his imaginary sister for most of the play) by a brilliant author who was also a notoriously bad playwright. It was only discovered, among Twain’s papers, in 2002—a brand-new, century-old play.
“I did not want to contemporize it,” says David Ives, who adapted the 1898 script. “What I did want to do was make it move a little more swiftly. Ambling is not the best thing for an audience in 2007.” The result is no drawing-room comedy; it’s Huck Finn meets Molière meets Hairspray, and it demands a quick wit. “I think farce is like doing a musical,” says director Michael Blakemore. “You can either sing the notes and dance the steps or you can’t.”
Butz is just the man for the part. Even with Ives’s updates, there are only so many Limburger-cheese jokes, hoary foreign stereotypes, and spontaneous bursts of jigging that a contemporary audience can take in an evening. And yet, every time Butz is onstage, doing one of his genius set pieces in drag, the years—and the cheese—melt away. Suddenly, you’re watching The Drowsy Chaperone without the in-jokes.
Butz says the best thing Blakemore told him in rehearsals was that “the characters in a farce have to think shallow and fast. And I think those are the two words to really describe me. That’s exactly how I think. The thoughts aren’t deep, but they come in rapid succession.”
Email
Print
Eight Year-End Films Vie for Oscar Contention
Sondheim and Lansbury on a Lifetime in Theater
The Black Keys Release Their Hip-hop Debut 
How the BQE Became an Artistic Muse
On Great Jones Street, Shopping Is Art 
Classic Fare, Old-world Charm at Le Caprice
Buy a Brownstone for Less Than $1 Million
Fifty of the City's Tastiest Soups
Reasons to Love New York 2009
New York Politicians Refuse to Quit
A-Rod Has Babe Ruth in His Sights
McCain Yields to the Party's Pressure
