`Mark Twain Tonight!” one of television’s finest hours (90 minutes, to be exact), is available for the first time on home video. In this landmark 1967 broadcast, Hal Holbrook re-created his signature one-man show, which earned him a Tony Award as well as an Emmy nomination for this presentation, which was watched by more than 30 million viewers.
Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens, has been very, very good to Holbrook, and vice versa. Holbrook has performed “Mark Twain Tonight!” for more than 50 years. He has given command performances for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Carter.
The show had humble beginnings. His characterization grew out of an honors project at Denison University after World War II. With his first wife, Ruby Johnson, he performed two-character scenes, one of which was an interview with Twain.
“We could always get off with our life with that,” Holbrook recalled in a phone interview from Washington, D.C., where he is performing as Shylock in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” “In 1948, we toured the school assembly circuit; 307 shows in 30 weeks. We traveled 40,000 miles in a station wagon. It was a hard learning ground playing to audiences who had never seen theater and couldn’t care less.”
The couple moved to New York in 1952, but work was scarce. A new father, Holbrook developed the solo piece out of economic necessity. When he was hired on the daytime soap opera, “The Brighter Day,” he performed as Twain at night in a Greenwich Village club.
In 1959, he opened in an off-Broadway theater. He was an instant success, “much to everyone’s almost total and complete amazement,” Holbrook said, laughing. “My compatriots on the soap opera were dumbfounded. I used to tell them some of the show’s anecdotes, and they never laughed. Each night (when I first performed the show in clubs), they looked at me like I was on my way to the execution chamber.”
Holbrook still performs “Mark Twain Tonight!” He said the show, for which there is no script, “is alive and volatile,” and he continues to tinker with it. The show endures, he said, because “you have a man standing up and saying what he thinks, telling you the truth about life. Very seldom is Twain off the mark talking about the behavior of the human race. You might disagree with him, but you’re probably wrong to do so.”
In addressing such provocative subjects as religion, race and politics, Twain might have set the stage for being politically incorrect, as witness his ode to smoking. “I was always ready to reform, if I could see any profit in it,” he said, “but the only profit I could ever see in it was the heavenly pleasure of giving up the reform and going back to smoking.”
Asked what Twain would make of, say, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Holbrook replied: “One thing I can be quite sure of” “is his reaction would be based on some moral values that do not change. As far as Monica is concerned, he would have excoriated Clinton for being a fool and degrading the office of the presidency.”
While “Mark Twain Tonight!” is Holbrook’s crowning achievement, the versatile character actor has not rested on its laurels. Nor has he allowed himself to become subsumed in the character he so often portrays. “I spent years of research to find out who Hal Holbrook is and not to become a faint copy of Mark Twain or anybody else,” he said. “That is a dangerous and a witless path to follow. Only someone with a limited imagination would want to cast himself in the mold of some other person.
“But I have been deeply affected by his writings and opinions. One thing I have noticed is that he became more distressed about the condition of society as he grew older. That’s certainly true of me, and that bothers me sometimes.”
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“Mark Twain Tonight!” is $25. Call 1-800-458-5887 to order.
