THEATER : The Fine-Tuning of Hal Holbrook : He’s ‘King Lear’ on stage and on screen in ‘The Firm’ and there are still shifts ahead

You expect Mark Twain or the smart-mouthing Evan Evans of “Evening Shade.” Instead you get King Lear striding through the Old Globe in San Diego’s Balboa Park.

The real Hal Holbrook, it seems, is finally standing up.

Tall, lean and sure.

This Lear’s beard is short, neatly cut and shaped. The longish hair doesn’t quite make it to the shoulders--wild yet tamed. Lear’s eyes burn, the great voice invokes the heavens and their denizens.

The face is a tortured Lear.

The tan Windbreaker and striped blue shirt are the casual, frontier, at-ease Twain.

How do the two personalities meet? The 68-year-old Holbrook says he is on a career-course correction, going after the big ones, tragic, demanding roles like King Lear or Shylock. Willy Loman looms.

Holbrook has been acting for 52 years, 39 in his one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight!,” which won him a Tony on Broadway in 1966. His credits and awards touch three territories--stage, television and movies. Last week marked the release of his latest feature film, “The Firm,” with Tom Cruise. This fall he returns to TV in his continuing role as Burt Reynold’s strong-minded father-in-law on “Evening Shade.”

For the moment, he’s fixed his gaze on the demanding lead role in “King Lear” opening Saturday at the Old Globe Theatre. It’s a double reunion of sorts for him. Two years ago he appeared for the first time at the Old Globe as Shylock in a modern-dress version of Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.” Three years ago he returned to the classics and appeared for the first time as King Lear at the Great Lakes Theater in Cleveland.

It’s too late for him, he says, to play Hamlet. But, of course, there’s always Mark Twain.

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Question: You’re best known for playing strong male characters, Mark Twain, Lincoln (“Sandburg’s Lincoln” miniseries), Shylock, Evan Evans (“Evening Shade”), Oliver Lambert (of Bendini Lambert Locke law firm in “The Firm”). Is this art imitating life?

Answer: There’s something humorous about that because I don’t think any of us see ourselves the way other people do. It’s taken me damn near 65 years to realize that I am a strong person, partly because my wife, Dixie Carter, keeps assuring me I am, or reminding me. But for most of my life I did not see myself as strong or as powerful. As I got older I began to realize through my relationships with my children and my wives that I’m stronger and at times more intimidating than I actually felt.

Everybody it seems is frightened, everybody is shy, everybody is very supersensitive. It’s just in the ways that we develop our defenses to prevent people from seeing the truth about us that we are defined in the eyes of others. The truth is something different.

I lost my parents when I was very young, they just left and I had to survive through my grandparents. I was sent to boys school and was knocked around by weird teachers and headmasters. Somehow I survived. I must have been much stronger than I thought I was.

I was raised by my grandpa from the time I was 2 and he died when I was 12. He had a phenomenal effect on me. He was a strong man. Very tough, but kind, in his way. It was not by any accident that I had success with characters like him--older men like Twain. As an actor I knew how to play old men.

My mother left me and my two sisters when I was 2. She went to New York and all we knew is that she left. An explanation was never given. Only recently, when I saw some letters she wrote to my father, I realized she left in order to survive. She wanted to go into show business and become a showgirl, working in musicals and vaudeville. I found her itinerary for her 1929-30 tour and discovered that I had played many of the theaters that she had.

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Q: You’ve long been associated with your one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight!” What brought you to Twain?

A: Economic necessity. I first did (readings from Twain) in the mid-40s at schools and colleges. It was one way to earn a little money. When I got out of Culver Military Academy I had a job at the May Co. in Cleveland for $18.74 a week. Acting in a play at the Cain Park Theatre got me $15 a week. So for three bucks I decided I would call myself an actor. Later I started doing brief appearances as Twain. I never thought that “Twain” would ever become the wonderful project that it did and have the success it has had. I fell in love with the material and I realized its terrific strength and entertainment value. “Twain” appeals to the American sense of loss, the loss of innocence, of pioneer values. It’s a very tender chord in our national soul.

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Q: So why now Lear? Was it your decision or was it a role offered to you?

A: It was offered to me four years ago by Gerald Freedman, the artistic director of the Great Lakes Theater and years ago Joe Papp’s main man at (New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theatre). I was doing my Twain in Cleveland at the Palace Theater, where I since found out my mother had played. But I have to go back. Earlier that year, my wife’s manager asked me when I would do “ Your Lear.” “My Lear? You’re kidding,” I said. “No,” she said, “When are you going to do your Lear?”

I was having the worst year of my career. I was very depressed, so I thought, you know, hmmm. I read the play, which I hadn’t read in many years although I had seen several productions, and found to my astonishment that I understood it very well and I had a tremendous emotional connection with it, a connection I didn’t have with it years before. It really hit me. I had been through quite a bit, and so I took a few speeches and while on the road, while making up, I learned them. Then I started using them when I did sound checks on the road. I was doing a Lear speech as a sound check at the Palace in Cleveland and noticed a man in the wings. He later introduced himself as Gerald Freedman, and we talked. He said he was next door at the Iowa Theater and said he wanted me to do King Lear. “You should do it,” he said.

That year I had started directing a movie project and at the last minute during rehearsals the money fell out. It was an awful, horrible experience where I had poured my heart and soul into this thing for a year, turning down work. I fell into a terrible slump. I also had a terrible experience at an audition for a movie when the young star was arrogant and hurtful. It was a last straw. I felt like so much of a nobody.

But one day I woke up and said, boy, are you in a real big deep rut, and you’re going down for the count. You’d better pull yourself together. The best thing I could do was to take on the toughest challenge I could think of and that was King Lear. So I called Jerry and told him I really want to do this. We talked and talked and then wrote to each other and finally I committed to it in early 1990. We did it in April and May at the Great Lakes Theater and in the fall we took it to New York.

It was the best decision I had made in many, many, many years. It shoved me back into the theater. I found I could respect myself there, and I could deal with roles and materials that had size and importance and intelligence and eloquence. There was beautiful material you can’t even dream of getting in television or movies. Oh, movies, look at the junk now. Everything is either mechanical or murder. So every year since then I’ve done one or two plays. I did Lear twice that year. Next year I did “Uncle Vanya,” then two years ago Shylock.

These plays are a feast.

Then last year I did two new plays, not quite the same challenge as doing these great big classics. Classics like “Lear” test you. I grieve to think I wasted so many years of my life just pursuing money and fame. It’s too late for me now to play so many roles that would have been such a thrill to do.

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Q: What would you have liked to have done?

A: Hamlet, the full thing. Richard III, Richard II. MacBeth, which in certain versions I still could do.

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Q: What about American theater?

A: I’m going to do “Death of a Salesman” next year. Then “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” If I live. Those are two of the biggest.

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Q: For a role as tough as Lear, how do you prepare for it?

A: In doing Shakespeare you have to deal with language and structure in a different way. The requirements are profoundly different from any modern play. You first start with the text. Usually on first reading I have only the vaguest notion in hell what Shakespeare’s talking about. Then I read it again and I understand it a little better. Then I go back and read it again and start to understand it more. You look for the emotional hook. Then I start working on the verse. I learn speeches and say them to myself in the shower or in the car or walking down a street. I just get into the language and meter and do it the way I like to do it.

Next, you have to get into voice and physical training. You have to get yourself strong and have to get your voice out of your throat and get it up in your head and keep it up there.

Physically, you need a lot of strength. In “Lear’s” first hour you are going from one part of a mountain to the next. There’s no easy stuff in there. It’s unrelenting. So I swim a lot in the mornings and do some exercises for my back because I have to carry Cordelia at the end of three hours. And in this version I have an extra burden in having to carry the Fool in one scene.

The big problem in playing Lear is not to peak too soon. The role has defeated many actors because it sucks you in. Tremendous anger drives this man. An hour goes by before he gets to the storm, the peak, when he goes crazy. Yet in each of his scenes before that the man is driven to an emotional frenzy. You don’t want to blow it too soon, so it’s not all one screaming rage.

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Q: What is Lear’s message in these times?

A: There is a great warning to us that we should try to be human beings and try to find humility and honesty and decency and treat other people and families well. If one can reduce it, this is a play about one family and also a play about the cosmic family. In Lear’s case it has to do with the arrogance that comes from power and becoming used to having it all your way. That’s something we deal with in show business a lot. People get famous, rich and then they start going downhill. It’s a helluva fall. And Lear takes a terrifying fall. This is a play in which a man is crying out for answers to the gods, and he finds out that they don’t care about him. He’s just another human being. Nothing special. He can’t get the answers except in himself. He becomes a man of humility.

Television never has time for thoughts of this sort, certainly not on interview shows or “Entertainment Tonight.”

As you get older these thoughts become fueled with excitement, truth and light and are far more important than the little idiot messages that are given us 24 hours a day in television by our superficial society.

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Q: You’ve been a professional actor for 51 years. Let’s talk about the changes you’ve seen. You mention television. Start there.

A: It was in the early ‘70s that movies for television really began. They became an important thing. They were major events, maybe on a Monday and then maybe a Thursday. Now there are three a night, three alike and 17 more in the middle of the night every bloody day in the week. There’s nothing special any more. It’s just one great big wasteland of crap.

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Q: And the film business?

A: The motion picture business has become, like everything else, a panderer to the lowest common denominator instead of the highest, except for the Merchant-Ivory group and people like that. There are some glorious exceptions but they are so very slim. Everybody’s out for the fast whore buck.

No one is trying to elevate taste. People in charge are trying to play down to basic primitive instincts instead of trying to bring people up. But what’s the sense of even talking about it. I mean there’s no money in raising people up. There’s no money in doing “King Lear,” or in projects like that. There’s no money in it! That’s the whole watchword, the saintly phrase of our society. There’s no money in it! That’s the criterion upon which our society finally has come to rest.

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Q: The same in theater?

A: The theater has gone in that same direction, especially in New York. But the wonderful thing about the theater that I’ve experienced is that outside of New York in the past 30 years theater has developed a wonderful edge. The thing we dreamed of when we were young where every city had its repertory company is happening. Now we have regional theaters. And, by God, a lot of it is damn good. Look, you can criticize productions at Seattle Rep, here at the Old Globe, La Jolla, Hartford, Dallas, L.A.’s Taper, but they are there. They’re there!

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Q: Have you and your wife ever acted together, other than on “Designing Women?”

A: We met doing a play for television in 1980, playing husband and wife. Then in 1982 we did Thomas Babe’s “Bury the Inside Extra” for Joe Papp and the Royal Court in London. We’ve talked about future projects. Right now she’s in Memphis preparing to do “Streetcar Named Desire.”

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Q: When do you get back to “Evening Shade?”

A: It starts again in the middle of August, but I don’t go on it until “Lear” is over in early September. I have no contract for that show, only a handshake deal. I go on it when I don’t have a play or “Twain” to do, so I end up doing about half the shows. It’s a wonderful situation.

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Q: What’s for you after “King Lear”?

A: The next day after I finish here I start “Evening Shade” and that will take up about three weeks. Then a week off. Then a week of “Twain” in Philadelphia. Then a few weeks off. Next year I’ll bring “Twain” back to San Diego in March.

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Q: After almost 40 years of “Twain,” do you ever tire of the role?

A: The secret is not to do it very often. And I don’t. I book one week a month. And I only do two, at the most three, shows, in a week. That’s all. I purposefully refuse to use him too much.