Ever the Twain Shall Meet

Since 1954, Hal Holbrook has toured some part of the year in “Mark Twain Tonight!,” making it one of the longest-running plays in the history of theater.

Holbrook, who won a Tony and earned an Emmy nomination as Twain, brings his one-man show to Cerritos Friday and Saturday and Jan. 27 to San Bernardino.

His characterization of the writer of such classics as “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” was an offshoot of an honors project at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. He and his first wife, Ruby, fashioned a two-person play portraying characters from Shakespeare to Twain. After graduation, they toured the school assembly circuit in the Southwest, traveling 30,000 miles by station wagon.

When they moved to New Jersey and began a family, his wife didn’t want to travel, so Holbrook created “Mark Twain Tonight!”

The play opened off-Broadway in 1959 and then Holbrook began touring it around the country.

Holbrook brought “Mark Twain Tonight!” to Broadway in 1966, revived it in 1977 and completed a world tour in 1985.

The actor, who has worked on Broadway and in regional theater, won Emmy awards for the ‘70s series “The Senator,” “Pueblo” and “Sandburg’s Lincoln.” He’s also appeared in such movies as “All the President’s Men” (as Deep Throat), “Julia,” and “Men of Honor.”

Holbrook, 75, talked about “Mark Twain Tonight!” recently over the phone from his Los Angeles home.

Question: Do you have any idea how many performances you have given as Mark Twain?

Answer: Yes. I am in the 1,900 range now. I haven’t added it up in the last year or two. It is somewhere between 1,900 to 2,000. It may be 2,000 performances by the end of this year. I have the biggest tour booked this season than I have had in 25 or 30 years.

Q: How many performances are you giving?

A: Forty-three! I called my concert manager--we have been together 41 years. He started building up all of these dates, and normally I try to stop it at 25. I called him up and said, “What are you doing here?” I am playing everywhere from Jacksonville to Tampa to the Shubert Theatre in Boston to Minneapolis to Cleveland.

Q: Is it true that each performance of “Mark Twain Tonight” is different? Will each of your two nights in Cerritos be different?

A: They will be different. How different? I don’t ever set out to try to do an entirely different or a new show. I really play it the way I feel it. And when I am out there [on stage], I change it. I just looked at the notes I made for Cerritos in ‘98, the last time I was there. I will avoid a lot of the material that I did there. When I go into a town that I have played before, I shift a lot of the material.

Q: How do you keep track of all of the Twain material?

A: I never go to bed at night after a show until I write a complete report on the show. I have all of these notebooks--I have 12 dating back to the 1950s. We get out of the theater at midnight and then our stage manager and I will have to eat our dinner, and then I get to the hotel around 2 or 2:30 a.m.

Then I sit down and write up the show. I write everything from the name of the theater to the fee to the number of people who came. Then I describe the theater, how the lights were, whether the crew was good and cooperative. Then I list the selections that I did for the evening and write a little report on the show and rate it. I give a brief critique of the audience and myself.

Q: Since you have done the show so long, you must be get a lot of repeat business.

A: More and more--a surprising number. People come back [stage] afterward. I have never stopped people from coming back. Sometimes I have to stand there for an awfully long time, but I always felt you kind of owed it to people for them to be able to come back and talk to you. A lot of the times they are bringing their grandchildren now. More than about 75% or 80% of my engagements are all return engagements. I am doing some smaller towns, since the bigger theaters are getting to be tougher to get into because of the road shows.

Q: Do you scour the Twain canon to find new material for the show?

A: I do. It depends on what my year is like and how distracted I am--if I have a couple of movie jobs that take up a lot of time or if I do a play, which I try to do every year. If I do that, it eats up a lot of the year and I don’t have the time to concentrate on developing new material. But in the past two or three years, I have put in over an hour and half of new material, almost the equivalent in time of an entirely new show. It’s wonderful material. I have just enjoyed doing the show. It is weird, but I really enjoy the show now more than I ever had.

Q: Is it because of all the new material?

A: Partly because of the new material. Some of the new material seems to be hitting the nail on the head of what is going on in our society and our world right now. It sounds, sometimes, like it has come out of the morning newspaper. It is astonishing the immediacy of his commentary.

I found all of this terrific material [by Twain] such as: “In the early days of our Republic, we chose to believe in the motto ‘In God We Trust.’ If the nation ever trusted in God, that time has gone by. For nearly half a century our entire trust has been in the almighty dollar.”

Q: Was Twain so perceptive because human nature is always the same?

A: I have a whole new number which is on that theme: “The character of the human race never changes. It is permanent.”

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“Mark Twain Tonight!,” Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive, $27-$42. For tickets, call (800) 300-4345. Also Jan. 27 at 8 p.m., California Theatre, 562 W. 4th St., San Bernardino, $33-$38. (909) 889-6564.