Having gained an ardent downtown following in the late 1980's, he was hired in 1990 by Joseph Papp (along with George C. Wolfe and Michael Greif) to direct a season of plays at the Public Theater, including his own unruly epic farce, "Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain".
MAHWAH HIGH SCHOOL "Drop Dead," a murder mystery farce.
Twain returns to Broadway after, ahem, almost a century of death with a "new" play called, oddly enough, "Is He Dead?" A mixture of farce and satire, the comedy centers on a group of artists who plot to drive up the price of a friend's paintings by faking his demise.
Along with Evil Dead II, John Landis's supernatural farce revamped and revolutionised the comedy horror genre for the 1980s.
Dead Funny, Terry Johnson's 1994 farce about Englishmen who are more comfortable with sexist jokes than sex, has also been revived this winter.
Once again Stratford's rich stock of excellent character actors is instrumental here, with Cliff Saunders and Steve Ross bringing the headlong romantic farce to a dead halt as the henchmen turned hams in "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," one of the musical theater's greatest 11 o'clock numbers.
In Mark Twain's recently discovered 1898 farce, "Is He Dead?" (at the Lyceum, under the masterly direction of Michael Blakemore), the painter Jean-François Millet (Norbert Leo Butz) stages his own death and resurrection, in order to raise the value of his masterpieces.
To see Orton is to glory in the plot outrages (farce is farce, whether a dead body or a salacious boy toy is being hidden) and to laugh out loud as British English takes on the whiplash speed of the American wisecrack.
"It's practically abroad!" At farce speed, all things eventually disintegrate; "Is He Dead?" soon turns into what Eric Bentley called "the theatre of the surrealist body".
A dead end, leading, at best, to brave failure and, at worst, ignominious farce.
