Hal Holbrook returns with ‘Mark Twain Tonight’

Hal Holbrook has had the kind of career all performers dream of: He’s worked with luminaries of the stage and screen, and he’s been doing it consistently for six decades.

As one of Hollywood’s most sought-after character actors, Holbrook has had prominent parts in “All the President’s Men,” “Wall Street,” “The Firm” and “Lincoln.” In 2008, he was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting turn in Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild,” and he recently had a recurring role in the popular TV series “Sons of Anarchy.”

But Holbrook is probably best known for a role he originated in the early 1950s: Mark Twain. Holbrook’s Tony Award-winning one-man show “Mark Twain Tonight!” makes its way to Spokane this weekend, and it features the actor as the great American novelist reading selections from the author’s acerbic, witty essays and editorials.

“I just have a whole lot of material,” Holbrook said during a recent phone interview. “There’s no hard and fast rule here. I can change it if I want to. … I keep adding material and reworking material. But I never update Mark Twain’s material. … I quote Mark Twain; I don’t rewrite Mark Twain.”

Holbrook, sharp and ornery at 90, has performed as Twain thousands of times over the years (he last came to Spokane in 2011). But he can still recall the first time he brought the character to the stage.

“I was so damn scared, I didn’t know if I could go out on stage without falling over in fright,” he said. “I’d never done anything alone on the stage before. When I did the show the first time, it was at a teachers’ college in Pennsylvania. A morning assembly, 7 o’clock. I had worked and worked to try and edit together something that you might call a show.

“So I started out with the opening line, and they laughed! I didn’t even know it was funny! Then I said the next line, and they laughed again. After 20 minutes or so, I thought, ‘By God, this is pretty good.’ ”

There aren’t many moving parts involved in “Mark Twain Tonight!” Holbrook takes the stage in Twain’s distinctive white suit, addresses the audience directly and recites a selection of some of Twain’s headiest writing. While he’s acted alongside everyone from Paul Newman to Daniel Day-Lewis, Holbrook says that performing alone has its own benefits.

“People say, ‘How do you work without another actor?’ ” Holbrook said. “But I don’t have to worry – the audience is the other actor. I’m listening, I’m responding. We’re working together. It’s a totally different kind of experience than being in a play.”

Twain’s work dealt frankly and humorously with issues that most concerned America in the mid- to late 19th century, but many of those topics – religion, politics, racial and economic divisions – still inspire think pieces today.

“I think it’s always been very topical,” Holbrook said of his material. “(Twain) was writing about racism in ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ I mean, it’s clear as hell! … It’s not about children; it’s about the racism of the American people, especially along the Mississippi River. When he wrote ‘The Prince and the Pauper,’ he was writing about the same kind of thing, and that’s still going on today between the rich and the poor.

“In ‘A Connecticut Yankee (in King Arthur’s Court),’ he’s writing about the corruption of our society. There’s a line in there I use in the show … ‘A privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.’ Period, end quote. Now if that don’t hit the bull’s-eye, I’d like to know what does.”

But the main reason Twain’s work resonates with modern audiences, Holbrook says, is that he’s a fearless truth teller. We inherently admire someone who tells it like it is, he says, even if we don’t always like to hear it.

“I have never met or associated with anybody who told the truth continuously like Mark Twain,” Holbrook said. “That is the thing that astounds me about the man. He tells the truth, even though we have trouble looking at it ourselves, because it’s usually a joke on us. He’s telling the truth about you and me. … It shocks people, because they’re not used to the truth.

“I always have to remember that humor is the basic ingredient, and that’s what made Mark Twain so particularly special. He could take a serious subject and get serious about it but still somehow make you end up laughing at some revelation. He could make you see the ridiculousness in what he’s showing us, how utterly ridiculous we can be.”

Holbrook is still deeply committed to the personage of Mark Twain, and he’s nowhere near tiring of performing. If nothing else, he says, it allows him to work through his frustrations with the world today.

“It gets me outta bed, pal!” he said with a laugh. “All I’ve gotta do is look around and read the paper, and I get so pissed off that I can’t wait to get out there.”