Kyle Kellams: Mark Twain is one of the largest American figures, author, speaker, essayist, unofficial ambassador. The one-man show “Mark Twain Tonight”, a monumental part of American theater. Hal Holbrook earned a Tony and an Emmy for his work as Twain in the show. Holbrook created the work and then was the only person to perform it for half a century.
Now a second actor is taking the role. Emmy winner Richard Thomas will bring “Mark Twain Tonight” to Walton Arts Center for one night only, Friday, Jan. 23. He was most recently at the venue as Atticus Finch in Aaron Sorkin’s production of “To Kill a Mockingbird”.
Thomas says it’s an honor to bring this play to the stage and to continue something Hal Holbrook began in the mid-1950s.
Richard Thomas: He started when he was, I think, around 30, and he put it together slowly. It was originally a skit in a sort of overall show that he did with his wife. They would travel all over and do it. And then she couldn’t continue on the tour. And so he developed this Mark Twain thing himself, and he just kept working on it in nightclubs and different places and developed it over years into this wonderful show.
I saw it when I was 16, and there was a 1967 performance on public television that he did, and the whole family watched it. It was great. I knew Hal, we had a very warm, collegial relationship, although I never worked with him. But we knew each other over the years, and it was just a marvelous, marvelous performance. And it was his life’s work, aside from all the other terrific performances he gave.
Kellams: Didn’t I read that he would maybe change what he read? And I’m wondering, how does this version, what you bring, how may it or may not vary from what Hal Holbrook did?
Thomas: Right. Well, what Hal did was over the years compile all this and sort of curate all this material and create a little bridging pieces to sort of stitch it together to give it some continuity. And what you inherit when you do this show is sort of like a wonderful deck of cards of all these different pieces that he used, and you’re absolutely free to shuffle the deck any way you like and deal them out differently night after night.
Now, you know Hal had decades to do this. I had a couple months to learn it, two or three months to learn it. So I couldn’t do that. It’s taken me a while to learn, I had to learn a show. And so what I did was I took the script of the ‘67 broadcast, which I had seen. And I learned that and I took some things out that didn’t seem quite so salient at the moment, and added some other things and made it a little longer because it was shorter then, up to about 90 minutes. And so I learned that and that was the show I opened with. And as I’ve been going along, I’ve added a few pieces and shuffled a couple of things around for different parts of the country. And it’s really fun. But you’ve got to learn the stuff. So I don’t have all of it in my head at the moment.
Kellams: Well, the number one comes up to me a couple times in this because it’s one actor, you on stage, and what is that like? It’s just you.
Thomas: It’s wonderful. I miss being in a company. One of the joys of theater is playing in a company. And you have your colleagues on stage to go to. If anything gets weird, you can always check in with each other. On the road touring with a company is wonderful, because you create a beautiful bond, and it’s just very special. But the one-man show is exciting for another reason. We’re always aware of the audience, and the audience is always the guest performer every night. You never know how they’re going to go. Every night in the theater is like a blind date. So the audience is always a participant, and you’re always aware of them. But when you’re doing a one-man show, it’s just you and them, and especially where you’re talking to the audience and really trying to create a sense of intimacy with them directly. And that is very exciting and lots of fun to do. I enjoy that a lot.
Kellams: The last time we saw you at Walton Arts Center, you were part of a company. It was Aaron Sorkin’s version of “To Kill a Mockingbird”. You were here for a week.
Thomas: That’s right. I loved it there. I’d never been there before. I loved being there. I loved that theater, and I liked that community a whole lot. So I’m looking forward to getting back.
Kellams: But on this tour, you’re doing at most two nights in one place. It’s mostly one night. That’s crazy.
Thomas: This is crazy. It’s more like being a singer, a musician or a comedian who comes in for a weekend or a show or two shows and then goes to the next town. It’s very different from touring a play, and it’s a whirlwind. When you started the conversation, I told you I was in Knoxville, but actually I go to Knoxville tomorrow. I’m actually in Chattanooga today.
So don’t ask me. Basically, you’ve got the drive to the hotel, you’ve got the airport, you’ve got the drive to the hotel, you set up your room, you go to the theater, you do your show, you come home, you pack up and you leave the next morning. So it’s really wild.
Touring is challenging in a lot of ways, even though I really love it a lot. But this one is particularly challenging in terms of the schedule. But my wife and I are traveling together on this one the whole way through, so it’s wonderful to have her with me as a companion. And that makes it more of an adventure and less of a schlep.
Kellams: Good. I mentioned that you were here for “To Kill a Mockingbird”. For those of us who don’t portray different roles, we’re not actors, I think we tend to see similarities. And I think Atticus Finch and Mark Twain do have some similarities, though they’re a century apart. They’re both embedded in times of racial awakenings. Do you, as an actor, see similarities between those two characters?
Thomas: Well, absolutely. They’re quintessentially American. They have become, it’s a word that I really hate to use, but they have become sort of iconic figures. One of them was a real person, even though Mark Twain was a pseudonym. The other one was a fictional character who was so real to people.
A lot of people talk about Atticus Finch like he actually was a real person. He’s that powerful. But he is American. They are both Americans grappling with the growing up and the waking up of the country, certainly in terms of Atticus Finch dealing with the role of race in our society. Now Twain, that’s kind of where it ends. They both come from rural parts of the country, Missouri and Alabama. But the similarities really end there.
Atticus Finch was a real estate lawyer, an unassuming guy in a small town in Alabama who takes on this case reluctantly of this Black man. And in doing so, what he goes through and what his family goes through, forces him to learn a whole new lesson about community, about race and about Black trauma and all these things. He’s just a normal guy.
Mark Twain is anything but that. Mark Twain was born in Hannibal, Missouri, but he traveled all over the world. He was a true cosmopolitan. He lived in this fabulous house in Hartford, Connecticut. And he was a very sophisticated man who maintained this country persona in his writing and performances. It was accurate, but it was not the whole of him. Also, Twain was a huge ego. He was a giant American figure. He was a maximalist. His likes and dislikes, his passions, his prejudices were just huge. That makes him a delicious character to play and fun to watch.
He was our first great stand up comedian really, globally, and most famous. I mean, there were a couple before him, and a lot of people don't know that he did these wonderful performances. Not only all across the country, but around the world. When he was working out of his bankruptcy situation, he did a world tour and was famous globally for doing these performances. And what Hal Holbrook did was to sort of manufacture one of these evenings, based on Twain's writings and what he'd studied about Twain. So I'm doing what Hal did, and Hal was doing what Twain did. So. So that's the difference, really, between Atticus and Twain. Twain is a larger than life figure who's actually real. Atticus Finch is a very kind of normal, everyday guy who is actually fictional. And it's very interesting.
Kellams: I'm in the middle of Ron Chernow's biography about Twain, and just a while–
Thomas: I love that book.
Kellams: Yeah, wildly complicated life. And you mentioned going abroad and he did have an ego. But who doesn't?
Thomas: Right. Huge. I mean everybody's got one and we all wrestle with them, but fame and ambition will do that. I mean we all have our narcissistic angel to wrestle with. But what's exciting to me about Twain, and this is one of the things that I think is so wonderful about the show is that his evolution from a boy in mid-nineteenth century slavery, Missouri, the evolution of his social awareness, his awakening about religion, about politics, about race, about imperialism, about all these things mirror the country's awakening and the country's progression and development and evolution in terms of its social conscience. And that's one of the things that makes him, I think, perennially Important. He is us, and he still is us in large measure.
I mean, you know, we've opened the borders of our consciousness beyond simply what he represented. But he still represents all the complications and contradictions, aspirations, failures and values that we manifest as well as a country.
Kellams: I want to ask you about the responsibility that comes with this, because, as you mentioned, Twain is this American, one of the largest American figures. You're just the second actor to do this sort of tent pole of American theater. Hal Holbrook, now you, do you feel a sense of responsibility both to kind of Twain and to Hal Holbrook?
Thomas: Look, I always feel a sense of responsibility to the playwright when I do a show, okay? And my colleagues. I don't have to worry about the colleagues on this one. But you have to be in fealty to and in service of the language and the material first. And that happens to be Twain as put together by Hal. It's like on a tightrope, just don't look down, you know? I mean, if I look to the right, there's Mark Twain on one shoulder. If I look to the left, there's Hal Holbrook on the other shoulder. You know, you just got to go out there and do your show.
And the people that I feel the greatest responsibility to really, other than Hal and Twain, is the audience. So I just want to get out there and give everybody a good, thoughtful time with a lot of humor and some provocation of thought. But I do honor them both, and I do respect them both. And I'm really grateful that I got this chance to do their work.
Kellams: Well, enjoy Chattanooga, Knoxville, all the stops between safe travels. Can't wait to see you in Fayetteville again.
Thomas: I'm looking forward to Fayetteville. Thanks for having me.
Kellams: Richard Thomas will perform the one-man show Mark Twain Tonight at Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville on Friday, Jan. 23. We spoke earlier this month.
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