TheatreHD: Talents and the Dead

“Sitcom to the grave”: Sergei Lazarev in a bright farce based on the only play by Mark Twain. The play by Evgeniy Pisarev is about a young, poor and truly talented artist and a group of his friends who play out a funny and daring farce in a French suburb, using the imaginary death of a comrade to achieve wealth and fame. The play "Is He Dead?" is the only work by playwright Mark Twain, found in 2003 in the archives of the University of California at Berkeley. The main character of the play, the young artist Jean-François Millet, barely makes ends meet. His works are not for sale, his fiancee's family is in debt to the rogue, and the artist friends with whom he shares a bohemian Parisian attic are even bigger losers than himself. One of the potential buyers involuntarily suggests a recipe for salvation: living artists are valued inexpensively, but as soon as the author dies, the prices for his paintings immediately jump. The friends decide to commit a hilarious fraud: they decide to declare Millet first terminally ill and then dead, and they decide to dress the artist himself as his fictional sister, who will now have to sell her brother’s works... (Roman Dolzhansky. Kommersant)