By Joanne Degnan, Managing Editor
ROBBINSVILLE The Robbinsville High School Raven Players are performing in the hilarious comedy “Is He Dead?” by Mark Twain tonight (Thursday), Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in the RHS Performing Arts Center.
The play is a fictional farce about the 19th century French painter Jean-Francois Millet, who fakes his demise in order to drive up the price of his paintings.
”You know a show is fun when everyone is having such a good time that by the end they are laughing so hard that they are crying,” said director Alison Sussman on Sunday after a dress rehearsal had the crew roaring hysterically in the audience.
In Twain’s long-lost play (it wasn’t discovered until a century after his death) Millet, portrayed in the RHS production by Justin Snyder, is in love with Marie Leroux, but in debt to a villainous picture-dealer, Bastien Andre. Andre, portrayed by Sal Scavo, forecloses on Millet, threatening debtor’s prison unless Marie, portrayed by senior Karis Gallant, marries him.
Millet realizes the only way he can pay his debts and keep Marie from marrying Andre is to die so that he becomes rich and famous. Millet fakes his death and prospers, all the while passing himself off as his sister, the Widow Tillous. Now a rich “widow,” he must find a way to come back to life, and marry Marie.
”Is He Dead?” not only provides laughter, it also provides an opportunity for students to learn about the life and works of a literary icon and an influential painter who was one of the founders of the Barbizon school in France. A study guide for the play will be used in classrooms in multiple disciplines as students explore the significance of both Twain and Millet’s works.
The cast and crew of “Is He Dead?” spent six weeks engaging in an improvisational comedy workshop with local actor and theater studio owner Jody Wood as they prepared to perform their first farce in four years. They shared their newly honed comic skills at Take 5 Gourmet in the Foxmoor Shopping Center on Nov. 9 doing improvisational scenes in the style of the popular television show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”
In the past four years, the Robbinsville High School theater program has graduated students in both acting and design to top conservatory programs such as Tisch School of the Arts, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Emerson, and Elon. Graduating students have earned full scholarships for college for both performance and production.
Over the last six months, RHS alumni have successfully entered the New York theater world as Katrina Pallop (Class of 2008) wrote, starred in, and directed a play picked up by the off-Broadway Women at Work Festival, and Laura Williams (Class of 2010) spent the summer working in the prop shop for The Public Theatre building props for Shakespeare in the Park.
Tickets for “Is He Dead?” are available at the door and cost $8 for students and $10 for adults.
