NEW YORK (Bloomberg) ¿ Mark Twain died 97 years ago and theatre folk have been feeding off his carcass ever since, so maybe it's finally his turn. "Is He Dead?"

Twain's torn-from- the-headlines riff on popular artists, the French and a cross-dressing hero who stages his own "death" in order to boost sales, goes before audiences for the first time ever, with previews beginning last night at Broadway's Lyceum Theater. It was written in 1898.

Assisting the humourist, who speculated that he was a lousy playwright, is the affable and decidedly unlousy playwright David Ives, who adapted the recently discovered text of "Is He Dead?" The director is Michael Blakemore, one of the most accomplished directors in the business, having made hits of such contemporary classics as "Noises Off" and "City of Angels''.

"Shelley Fisher Fishkin discovered the manuscript in the back of a filing cabinet," Ives said.

''We were speaking in a 42nd Street studio during a rehearsal break one afternoon, as actors departed and the company of designers and managers buzzed around us.

"Twain wrote the play and it was supposed to be produced by Bram Stoker, the guy who wrote `Dracula', but then his warehouse burned down."

Fishkin, a Twainiac in academe, found her way to former TV producer Bob Boyett, whose fingerprints (not to mention cash) are all over Broadway these days. Boyett called Ives, who, in addition to being one of the funniest writers around, has a reputation as a skilled adapter of other peoples' work (notably, the recent revival of "Wonderful Town"). Ives himself had recently become steeped in Twain's work and felt the call from Boyett was fate and not to be taken lightly.

"I read the play and found it delightful, so I said to Bob, `Are you kidding?"' admittedly an odd thing to ask of a producer about a comedy. "I said I'd love to be Mark Twain's imaginary playmate."

"Twain's first play wasn't very good, but he made a lot of money out of it," Blakemore, 79, said. "He wasn't really a playwright, which is why David's contribution is very central to what we're doing."

"It was quite clear what needed to be done," said Ives, 57. "Twain had maybe 35 people on stage, which is not exactly viable these days. I brought it down to a cast of 11. I tried to learn what these characters' voices were and do a kind of literary ventriloquism. Since he threw the play away, I saw it as my mission to pick up where he left off."

Twain described himself as lacking in the basic gifts of the dramatist and critics tended to support that assessment, calling his one stage hit, "Colonel Sellers'', from 1874, "wretched''. Twain was in a miserable state when he began writing "Is He Dead?" having recently lost his beloved daughter and flirted with bankruptcy. He feared his writing powers had waned and, like Charles Dickens before him, hoped the stage would bring back his audience and improve his fortunes.

"Is He Dead?" also reveals Twain's cosmopolitanism, having been built essentially around Americans' fin-de-siecle lust for French art, particularly the work of Jean-Francois Millet, whom Twain himself admired and who is portrayed in the show by Norbert Leo Butz, one of the funniest actors alive, as he proved in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels''.

"Twain borrowed from the biggest success of the 19th century, `Charley's Aunt'," Blakemore noted, "which appeared about four years before he wrote `Is He Dead?"' As Fishkin points out, both plays use the device of cross-dressing, with a man impersonating a woman while being essentially clueless as to how a woman comports herself, the source of much of the comedy.

"He was broke and playwriting has always been the directest access to bags of money," Blakemore said.

"Really? Is that true?" Ives interjected. "Nobody told me." Anyway, Ives said, "Huck Finn puts on a dress." Twain had swum in this river before.

"David introduced an element of Feydeau farce into the second act that isn't in the original," Blakemore continued, "so while it's still very Twain in the tone of voice and the attitude, it has the energy of 20th-century American comic writing."

I wondered how a "new" comedy by a writer dead nearly a century was going to be sold to theatregoers more attuned to the rhythms of television. There's always a hunger for great comedy, Blakemore insisted.

"And besides," Ives added, "there aren't any other plays by Mark Twain going up this season."