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Hal Holbrook’s “Mark Twain Tonight!” has Ohio roots
Hal Holbrook in “Mark Twain Tonight!” 8 p.m. Thursday, May 14, Procter & Gamble Hall, Aronoff Center for the Arts, 650 Walnut, Cincinnati. $25-$45. (513) 621-2787; www.cincinnatiarts.org.
Although he grew up in New England and has spent most of his adult life living in New York and Los Angeles, Hal Holbrook has deep connections to Ohio: He was born here and he was educated here.
His family was originally from New England, but his parents lived in Lakewood, a suburb of Cleveland when he was born in 1925, although he was too young to remember the move to New England.
“I got out of Cleveland faster than most people have been able to,” he said in a phone interview. “My mother took off and my father followed her and abandoned me. My grandfather took me and my sister back to our ancestral home.”
He later found out that she left to go into show business, but he never heard from either of his parents again.
His own route into show business came quite by accident, he said.
“I had not interest in that sort of thing, and my family had no interest in that sort of thing,” he said. “We were what you would call an upper middle class family that never went to the symphony or theater or anything like that.”
He attended the Culver Military Academy in Indiana, and during his senior year he needed a credit so a friend advised him to take a dramatics class because it would be easy.
“I thought he was a weird guy, that all the dramatics students were weird, and was reluctant to join up with them because they were very unmilitary,” he said. “But I got to like them because they were fun.”
Then, when Holbrook got on stage for the first time, “something enormous happened,” he said.
“I think it had to do with the fact that people were listening to me for the first time in my life,” he said. “We all want to be heard. That’s a powerful force in anyone’s life.”
Every week at Culver, the students had a guest speaker at chapel. One Sunday, he was asked to read the scripture when Kenneth Brown, the president of Denison University in Granville, Ohio, was there to speak. By then, Holbrook had been fully bitten by the theater bug.
“I deplored the way they mashed the life out of the scripture reading in a dreary way,” he said, “so when it was my turn, I was determined to put on some kind of performance.”
Afterwards, Dr. Brown complimented him on his reading and asked where he was going to college. Holbrook told him the University of Michigan because at the time it had one of the top theater programs in the nation. Brown said that Denison had a wonderful theater department under the direction of Ed Wright and encouraged Holbrook to check it out.
That summer, 1942, he went to a casting session at Cain Park Theatre in Cleveland and ended up with roles in three plays.
“During the casting session, one of the directors came up to me and introduced himself as Ed Wright,” Holbrook said. “He was directing ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner.’ He (and Dr. Brown) had talked about me, which I thought was pretty impressive. I got to know him better and decided to go to Denison to stick with him. It was the best decision I ever made. He was a great teacher and a great inspiration.”
It was Wright who steered Holbrook toward Mark Twain. Wright was attending a convention of the International Platform Association that united speakers with venues and met a man who booked school assemblies and wanted an educational dramatic program. Wright told him about Holbrook and his first wife Ruby, that they had a show where they did scenes from Shakespeare and Mark Twain. Wright got them the booking to do a tour of Oklahoma and Texas, so then they had to come up with a show.
“We worked on it all year,” Holbrook said. “Ruby worked up the costumes and I did the literary part of working on the material.
They ended up doing 307 school assemblies in 30 weeks.
“We did two or three shows a day and traveled over 30 thousand miles at tremendous speeds to get from one show to the next,” he said. “It was a very tough experience. I played just about every small town in those areas, and we learned our trade. We learned how to survive on stage, entertaining a wide span of age groups.
“We were doing high-class material but they were never familiar with it. They had never seen a play. We performed on the floor most of the time because if they had a stage it was way across the gym floor from the bleachers.”
Doing Mark Twain was only a small part of that show that gave an overview of literary history and included a lot of Shakespeare, and he had to put on the make-up in 45 seconds, he said, while Ruby would do the introduction.
When he started performing “Mark Twain Tonight” as a solo show in 1954, it took him four hours to do the aging make-up in a pre-show routine that he maintained for nearly 30 years. But around 15 years ago, he said that he was doing a play in New York and was getting ready to go on tour as Twain, and while waiting for his cue backstage one night, he explored his face.
“I got out my hand mirror and saw the wrinkles, the indentations and the sagging jowls,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘You idiot! You don’t need all that make-up anymore.’”
Holbrook still uses a prosthetic nose to give it the distinctive shape along with the wig, mustache and eye brows.
“Mark Twain Tonight” has been a constantly evolving program as Holbrook continues to edit from the wealth of material Twain left, not only his novels, but newspaper columns, essays and personal letters, estimating that he has about 17 hours of material to draw from every night. He said he’s able to keep the show up-to-date and relevant to the news of the day without making contemporary references because little has changed since the late 19th century as far as human nature is concerned.
“If you’re careful and spend of lot of time working on it, you can string the material together so that the audience makes the connection,” he said, and said that lately he’s been weaving portions of Twain’s essay “The War Prayer” into the second act.
“Because of terrorism, a handful of people from God knows where can knock down two towers and we are aware now that we cannot be safe behind two great oceans,” Holbrook said. “If we want to live in a world without wars, it may be that we have to learn how to live with other people.
“I don’t think that people, no matter what their political persuasion, would have a hard time accepting that.”
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