Lost Mark Twain play is heading to Broadway. A researcher “was not thrilled to find the drawer crammed with Twain plays she had not yet read and didn’t care to.” But when she did read through that drawer, she found Is He Dead?She said:

“He had even managed, and this was not necessarily his strong suit, a plot, with memorable characters and hilarious scenes. I thought it held great promise.” She wasn’t the only one. In a letter dated Feb. 5, 1898, Twain wrote that his wife found the new comedy “very bully.”

The play had never been performed. Why?

The explanation left politely unspoken in rejections he received was that the play as it stood was lumpy and only intermittently funny.

“It has a great idea,” [playwright David Ives] allowed. “In movie terms, La Boheme meets Tootsie. But even at first reading I thought it really does need help. The construction is like a shack that is not very well buttressed; at the slightest touch, pieces of it would fall off.”