Mark Twain Tonight!
(Photo © Chuck Stewart)
When Hal Holbrook first trotted out Mark Twain Tonight!, he was less than half the age of the famous writer and cracker-barrel philosopher he was portraying. At that time, inquiring minds wanted to know how he got himself to look a simultaneously world-weary and plucky 70. He did it, in part, by spending four hours making himself up as the craggy author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But now that Holbrook is 80, he only spends two-and-a-half hours preparing himself to look like Twain.
Thirty-nine years after he snagged a Tony Award as Best Actor in a Play for his impersonation, he’s still shuffling onto a practically bare stage and chatting more or less extemporaneously from 16 hours worth of Twain’s writings that he’s memorized and dramatized. He sticks around for two hours (with intermission), licking and lighting and re-lighting a cigar before claiming — in the guise of the man born Samuel Langhorne Clemens — that “my teeth are loose” and then retreating into the wings. Consulting his pocket watch for a second time (he’s done so at the close of Act I), Twain comments with the kind of sentimentality he’s previously steered well clear of that he realizes he’s earned the “affection” of the American people. He goes on to say with no hint of Twain-like derision that he’s grateful for the response.
Holbrook is receiving concomitant affection for his continued championing of one of the country’s best critics and, paradoxically, best promoters here and abroad. Indeed, there are points during the free-form monologue when it’s impossible to discern whether the actor or the author is appreciated more. That’s especially true during the curtain call; perhaps the enthusiastic reception, including many cheers, is for Holbrook and Twain in equal parts.
During the performance, Holbrook ambles back and forth from a carved chair and side table placed stage right to a lectern stage left as he chats about reform, his disdain for the U.S. Congress, and his dislike of the French. He makes cracks such as “I was born modest but it wore off” and “Elections are the time when flotillas of half-truths go sailing by.” In talking about his first wife, Livy, he concludes his remarks with “Wherever she was, there was Eden” — a line out of Extracts from Adam’s Diary, one of Twain’s innumerable shorter giggles. (Note that Holbrook’s Twain may not make the same observations at every performance, since the program lists 73 sources from which he might quote.)
Holbrook’s intention is to create the illusion that patrons are seeing an exact replica of a personal appearance by Twain, and he succeeds in large measure. But perhaps he deviates from Twain’s actual presentations when, rather than reading from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he enacts the selection as the actor he is and not the pundit Twain was. At the performance I attended, Holbrook delivered the sequence where Huck and Jim are on their raft and men aboard a nearby boat want to know whether Huck might be harboring an escaped slave. Here we have Holbrook playing the aging Twain playing Jim, Huck and the interlopers. It’s a tour de force within a tour de force, marred only by some garbled speech.
During the evening, Holbrook’s Twain rarely becomes heavily autobiographical; while the man with the walrus mustache and the three-piece suit vouchsafes his many iconoclastic thoughts, he doesn’t reveal too many feelings. (This is probably true to Twain’s on-the-road appearances.) Although he talks about Livy, he doesn’t report the tribulations that the couple endured, including the death of a son and some financial setbacks; indeed, it was bankruptcy that sent Twain on the lecture trail. (For more on these and other matters, pick up Ron Powers’ Mark Twain: A Life when it’s published in September.)
Although 10 producers are billed for this outing of Mark Twain Tonight!, three of them being Holbrook’s children, there are no other credits given. Well, there isn’t much of a set, only a few light cues, and the costume designer is Twain himself. Missing more notably is a director’s credit. That task has probably been taken on by Holbrook, and its arguable that nothing more is needed — although a quibbler would mention that, while Twain’s cross-stage meanderings may be historically accurate, a director other than Holbrook might have found a way to give them more variety.
The last thing to say about Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain — other than “go see him if you haven’t already, and even if you have” — is that Twain was one of America’s superlative humorists. His writings provoke more chuckles than belly laughs, but he personifies a country coming of age and finding its own cocky, idiosyncratic voice.
