Citizen Twain’s Whistle-Stop : Stage: Richard Henzel brings ‘Mark Twain in Person,’ a timely but lesser-known one-man show, to Irvine Barclay Theatre tonight.

Richard Henzel doesn’t mind telling you that Mark Twain is about to do a Perot in reverse.

Twain will be getting out of the presidential race tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, where Henzel plans to make the announcement in his one-man show, “Mark Twain in Person.”

“I’ll be giving the reasons why at that time,” the 43-year-old actor said earlier this week in a telephone interview from his home in Oak Park, Ill., just outside Chicago.

Twain’s decision, however, does not mean he has decided to support the Republican incumbent. The maverick writer and the President have only one area of agreement, Henzel said, and that is the campaign to remove “In God We Trust” from the U.S. currency.

Even on that issue their agreement rests on different ideas.

“Twain wants the motto removed because he doubts the veracity of the statement,” Henzel explained. “The President wants it removed because he’s worried that money with those words on it might end up in bordellos and gin mills.”

The President is, of course, Theodore Roosevelt; the campaign that of 1904. Henzel believes there’s a certain resonance.

In any case, he’ll be getting a leg up on Hal Holbrook, whose “Mark Twain Tonight!” comes to the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Oct. 30, virtually on the eve of this year’s election.

Not that Henzel feels he’s competing with the more famous Twain impersonator. In fact, he’s grateful to Holbrook for inspiring him in the first place, he said, noting that he got his start 25 years ago as a high school senior “doing Holbrook doing Twain.”

The two impersonators have not only met, but they share “the same Jedi master,” Henzel added, referring to the late Twain scholar Caroline Thomas Harnsberger, who introduced them more than a decade ago and “made sure there was peace” between them.

Moreover, while Henzel and Holbrook bear a resemblance to each other in their white linen suits (they also sport white mustaches and have aureoles of white hair), their shows emphasize different aspects of the 19th-Century author who, for all his maverick opinions, has become one of the nation’s cultural icons.

“I stick a little closer to the things Mark Twain did on the platform,” Henzel said. “I’m not as likely to dip in the ‘Letters from Earth’ and the really bitter, vitriolic things. And I avoid certain pieces that are Hal’s stock in trade, like ‘His Grandfather’s Old Ram.’ ”

Henzel, who does impersonations from Thomas Edison to Ronald Reagan, said he has about six hours’ worth of Twain material in his repertoire. But he never decides exactly what he’ll do for any particular show, he said, until he has a chance to gauge the audience.

Because of today’s political ferment, however, he said he feels certain that Twain’s withdrawal announcement will come at the top of the show.

Among favorite pieces he is considering for his Barclay appearance, he said, are “The Private History of a Campaign” (about the Civil War); “Jim Wolf and the Cats” (about a taffy pull for teen-agers); “The Cub Pilot’s Lesson” (from “Life on the Mississippi”); “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” (about Twain confronting his own conscience) and various stories of Twain’s experiences out West.

As might be expected, Henzel is something of a Twain scholar. He can tell you, for example, that Twain was a 31-year-old journalist working the Lyceum circuit as a humorous lecturer when he ran across the first professional entertainer to impersonate him at a theater in Cleveland.

“It was the same theater Twain had played in a couple of weeks before,” Henzel said. “The guy did Twain’s whole act. Twain was already famous. He was one of the first people who could walk down the streets of New York and be mobbed by a crowd.”

When Henzel is not doing Twain, he works as a movie and television actor, does voice-overs for commercials and puts together one-man shows for fund-raising benefits and corporate gatherings.

“I’ve been the founder of Rotary International and the founder of Underwriter Laboratories,” he said. “I’ve sold paper shredders (while impersonating) Richard Nixon for the General Binding Corp.”

More recently, he played the radio voice that wakes Bill Murray up every morning in “Ground Hog Day,” a not-yet-released movie directed by Harold Ramis. Other film roles have included the paraplegic hit man who ran over Roger Moore with a motorcycle in “The Naked Face” and one of the wacky cops on the SWAT team in “The Blues Brothers.”

Next week Henzel takes a shine to the founder of the Johnson Wax Co., the newest addition to his non-wax museum.

“I’m doing him . . . for a big company meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel” in Dana Point, Henzel said.

No political announcements are expected there.

Richard Henzel performs “Mark Twain in Person” tonight at 8 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. $14. (714) 854-4646.