It’s never easy for plays on Broadway. The billion-dollar industry is rightly perceived as a Disneyland for megamusicals such as Wicked, or the latest monster comedy by Mel Brooks. In any New York season, ticket-buyers can keep, at a pinch, two or three dramas afloat. Those that make it tend to be well-hyped British imports.

Such a hostile environment makes the world premiere of an unknown play by an extremely dead author all the more unlikely. And yet this month the novelist and American icon Mark Twain arrives on the Great White Way – nearly a century after his demise – with the art-world comedy Is He Dead?. The lost 1898 work was unearthed by a Twain scholar five years ago and has been extensively rewritten for a $2.4 million production.

Is He Dead?, directed by Michael Blakemore, could be the theatrical find of the year. Then again, it could be the most expensive taxidermy job in the history of Broadway. But its producer, Bob Boyett, argues that “the appetite is always good for a good play”.

David Ives, the playwright Boyett hired to tame the loose, baggy, vaudevillian script, insists that this reanimated Twain is fit for commercial duty. “It really got my comic envy going,” Ives says. “It’s not only about a man who fakes his own death, but who comes back as his own widowed sister to cover it up. It’s like Some Like It Hot times two.”

Still, the competition is unusually harsh in New York this autumn. Thirteen new plays and revivals are opening. Boyett is also producing Rock ’n’ Roll, by Tom Stoppard, The Seafarer by Conor McPherson and Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps by Patrick Barlow – all of which started life in London.

The unusual journey towards this Mark Twain revival began in the library stacks at the University of California in 2002, when Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin dubiously curled back the first manuscript page of Is He Dead?.

It’s hard to overestimate Twain’s status in American popular culture. In his white linen suit, with bushy white moustache and cigar, he’s as recognisable as Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are required reading in most high schools.

But Twain never achieved the fame in theatre that he sought. In 1898, at the age of 62, he moved his family to Vienna, where he studied playwriting and wrote Is He Dead?. Twain thought that his friend Bram Stoker – the Irish author of Dracula and a theatrical agent – would find a theatre for it. But the venture fizzled out after a catastrophic fire at a warehouse destroyed most of the scenery for the Lyceum Theatre in London, where Stoker was business manager. There were several more false starts, but eventually Twain turned back to prose fiction.

After his death in 1910, his papers ended up at the Mark Twain Papers archive in the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley. That play and others (Death Wafer and Ah Sin) lay in a filing cabinet. Twain’s failure to break into theatre was considered a footnote to his amazing career. Yet, as Fishkin started reading the 1898 satirical caper, she found herself chuckling.

Is He Dead? centres on the French realist painter Jean-François Millet (1814-75), whom Twain portrays as a dashing bohemian hero at the mercy of his cruel art dealer. Millet and an international entourage of artists and students drive up the price of his paintings by feigning his death. To keep an eye on the transactions while he continues to crank out canvases, Millet disguises himself as his own sister. Jokes about effete Frenchmen, philistine Englishmen and Limburger cheese-gobbling Germans abound.

“I could see it onstage in my mind’s eye,” says Fishkin, who teaches literature at Stanford University. “But I knew it was going to need experienced theatre artists to make that happen, and even Twain recognised that – the author left copious notes in the margins about scenes or comic bits he wasn’t sure would work.”

When he first read the script, Boyett deemed it a literary curiosity. “She sent me a handwritten copy and I thought, wow, this is very interesting, but it needs work,” he recalls. That’s where Ives came in.

To liven up old, outdated librettos, Ives combines several skills: researcher, art restorer and editor. Trimming excess was the first priority. “I tried to make it as compact as I could, since Twain brought characters in and then forgot about them.” Ives’s new jokes flirt with Monty Pythonesque silliness, a new female-to-male cross-dressing sub-plot and a bumbling French gendarme to wrap up the plot. “I call it a Twainsvestite comedy.”

But Ives knew that he couldn’t stray too far from the author’s sensibility. “I felt like I got a sense of what he was like as a playwright and tried to accommodate that,” he says. “It has to be pretty much in one voice, although I nudged what he had written in the direction of farce because it reminded me of Shakespearean comedy – Twelfth Night or As You Like It.”

The road to theatrical fame is littered with the trampled dreams of novelists. For every Samuel Beckett, scores more have tried and failed. In 1895, Henry James was jeered from the stalls as he took his bow for the stillborn Guy Domville; for most of his career Charles Dickens vainly supplicated the theatre gods; and Victor Hugo is better known for inspiring the megamusical Les Misérables than for his own contributions to French drama. More recently, Don DeLillo and Gore Vidal have dabbled in playwriting without really excelling at it.

The $2 million makeover of Is He Dead? may make all the difference to Twain’s theatrical reputation. But, if it is a hit, who gets the loot? The producer? The adapter? The professor who dusted it off? Fishkin says that a large portion of the royalties will go to the Mark Twain Foundation, which supports Twain-related organisations around the world.

If is a hit, could there be other Twain theatrical rough diamonds just waiting for a polishing hand? “I personally don’t find any of his other plays appealing,” Fishkin says. “This is the longest and most fully developed. It has a special place.”

Enter ghost: five more rediscovered plays

Achilles Fragments of Aeschylus’ lost Trojan War trilogy were found in Egypt on papyrus used as stuffing in a mummy’s case. A version was presented in 2004 by THOC, the national theatre of Crete.

Cardenio This gory work was performed in 1613 and was attributed to Shakespeare and John Fletcher in 1653. In 1990 Charles Hamilton identified a 1611 work as the missing Cardenio. Some groups put it on as a Shakespeare play. WoyzeckGeorg Büchner’s play, written in 1835-36, had its first production in 1913. Since then, Alban Berg made an opera of it, Werner Herzog filmed it and countless directors have tackled its proto-modernist vision.

The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer This thinly disguised homo-erotic tale of Tennessee Williams’s affair with a dancer, was written in 1940 and finally produced in 2006.

The Better Half Two University of Glamorgan professors uncovered this 1922 one-act comedy of manners by Noël Coward in the British Library. It’s currently playing at the Union Theatre, Southwark.

Is He Dead? previews at the Lyceum Theatre, 149 W 45th Street, New York (www.ishedead.com), from Thurs and opens on Nov 29

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