Mark Twain Tonight! is a one-man show written and originally performed by the late actor Hal Holbrook. It comes to the Triad this Thursday night at the Steven Tanger Center in Greensboro.
Taking on Twain — the great American novelist, public speaker and more — is Emmy Award-winning actor Richard Thomas. He spoke with WFDD’s David Ford, who began by asking him about picking up the baton from Holbrook after his more than 60-year run.
Interview Highlights
On accepting the role of Mark Twain:
"Well, I was completely surprised and sort of flabbergasted, because, I mean, no actor would ever set their sights on Hal's show, because it was Hal's life's work. And, you know, there was never any consideration while he was alive that anybody would ever even think about doing it. ... But I knew Hal for years, you know, and when the estate reached out, when I was doing the tour of To Kill a Mockingbird, and asked, it was first, just like, I can't even believe they're doing this. And then it was, 'Yeah, me, I'm doing it. Count me in!'"
On what fascinates him most about Twain:
"Well, I just love the fully lived richness of his character. You know, he was a maximalist in life. And you know, passions were great, his aversions were huge, you know, everything was writ large with him, you know, so it's a marvelously big person. And lived life all the way down to the ground, I think. ... We've added a lot of, thank God, a lot of voices to the American character over the years. And so now we have a multifaceted vision of what America is. But Twain was, then and still, in large part, a mirror of all the contradictions and ambitions and aspirations and failures of the American character. So really, he is us still, in large measure. And that. makes him, for me, endlessly fascinating."
On the staying power of Twain's observations:
"There are things that I speak in this that people ask me after the show whether I've added them or created them, because they seem to be so pertinent and so relevant to different aspects of our current life. And it's like, no, he wrote that, you know, that was in a gilded age, you know, over 100 way over 100 years ago. Because the things that were pertinent to him are still pertinent."