Role of his lifetime

When Hal Holbrook first donned heavy makeup to play an aged Mark Twain in a college campus performance in 1954, the actor was 29.

Now, after more than half a century of performing his one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight,” Holbrook has to play a younger man. Holbrook is 83. The author of “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” was 75 when he died in 1910.

It seems like an actor would tire of a role after playing the same one for a lifetime, but Holbrook hasn’t, partly because he keeps revising the show.

The performance his audience will see Saturday night in San Rafael won’t be much like the ones he did in Georgia and New Jersey a few weeks ago.

“I like to change things, and I have new stuff that I add every year,” the actor said. “I can take a phrase out of a letter here, a couple of sentences out of an essay there, and I can patch together a piece which speaks directly to something going on right now.”

Holbrook chooses each evening’s two-hour program from 16 or 17 hours of material he has prepared over the years. He calls the segments “numbers,” like musical selections in a jazz set, and often makes his choices shortly before the show.

“I jot down what I think I’m gonna do that night,” Holbrook said. “I’m never absolutely certain.”

The Nov. 4 election made a lot of Holbrook’s most recent script temporarily obsolete. The actor lamented having to cut it, because the great author had written some choice jibes.

“It’s hard to start up in the middle of a number,” Holbrook said, but then he did just that, quoting a bit of Twain’s political commentary:

“The spectacle of election time is a monument to the gospel that truth is stranger than fiction,” Twain wrote. “To find the truth in this parade of innuendo peddlers and assassins of character, masquerading behind the tarnished flag of patriotism, you have to discount 90 percent for softening of the brain, and swallow the other 10 percent with a dose of a salt.”

Twain couldn’t predict the specifics of current events, but Holbrook has no trouble finding material that speaks to today’s issues. For example, news reports deal with race every day. Twain lived through the end of the slave era and the Civil War.

“Twain was brought up in a slave town in Missouri. He grew up with little slave children. He married the daughter of one of the major abolitionists in New York State,” Holbrook said.

“I never update anything,” the actor added. “The audience makes the connection. Twain’s whole idea was not to beat somebody over the head with his opinions, which were strong. Twain’s analysis of our behavior is about as accurate as anybody’s ever has been. But he knew he was never going to change anybody’s mind, unless the person wanted to think.”

Holbrook and his wife, actress Dixie Carter, live in Los Angeles, but their second home is the house in McLemoresville, Tenn., where she was born. When Holbrook’s performance schedule takes him East, he prefers to stop there, rather than commute from L.A.

“It’s just a little two-gaspump, one-cannon town here in west Tennessee, with cotton gins across the road. The population is 307, and our cat,” Holbrook said by phone from McLemoresville. “I love being here.”

Holbrook keeps careful records of his performances, partly to avoid repeating himself too much, but he can only estimate the total number of “Mark Twain Tonight” shows he’s done.

“It’s over 2,100. I try to keep to about 30 every year,” he said.

It’s not like Holbrook can’t find other work. Last year, he was the oldest male performer ever nominated for an Academy Award, for his supporting role as Ron Franz in director Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild.”

“I take my hat off to Sean Penn a hundred times for what he did in that film,” Holbrook said. “It was a brave and daring story that required the audience not only to think, but to feel.”

Holbrook laments the lack of good roles on the screen, but said he’s always looking for a new challenge.

“It’s hard to find a television show, or even a film sometimes, that is worth doing,” he said. “Most of it is mental manure.”

Still, Holbrook has appeared in some great films and TV shows. He played Watergate whistle blower Deep Throat (later revealed to be Santa Rosa’s Mark Felt) in “All the President’s Men” in 1976. The same year, he played Abraham Lincoln in a series of TV specials based on Carl Sandburg’s biography.

So, his Tony-Award winning “Mark Twain Tonight,” which opened off-Broadway in 1959 and moved to Broadway in 1966, is hardly the only role in his repertoire. And yet, Holbrook remains devoted to the 19th-century sage from Hannibal, Mo.

“Mark Twain has had a terrific impact on my whole life and my thinking,” Holbrook said. “There’s no question about it. That’s what a great writer is supposed to do. He’s supposed to light up the inside of your brain.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com.