Hal Holbrook brings "Mark Twain Tonight!" to Merriam Theater

"Why did I start it up again? I never stopped!"

That's Hal Holbrook, who brings his one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight!, to the Merriam Theater on Thursday night. He's been doing the show since it debuted in 1954 at the then-Lock Haven State Teachers College in north-central Pennsylvania. In 1966, it got to Broadway, where it won him a Tony; the TV version the next year won him his first of five Emmys. And it has revisited Broadway since, most recently in 2006.

For more than 62 years straight, more than 2,200 performances, Holbrook, now 92, has taken Twain on the road. Twain himself lived to be 74.

Holbrook says he has a lot to thank old Sam Clemens for. Mark Twain Tonight! grew out of a show he did with then-wife Ruby Holbrook, in which she interviewed Hal, who portrayed a number of prominent historical figures. "I came upon Twain almost by accident, and it stuck," Holbrook says by phone. "I was a young actor with no money, and I knew no one was coming to help me. So I needed to find something I could rely on. I have kept taking it on the road, even when I was doing a film or a TV show or even Broadway. I have never given up on Mark Twain, and he has always come to my rescue."

He changes the show "all the time, suiting it to the moment, the time, the place, what just happened." Holbrook estimates he has worked up more than 15 hours of Twain material, an astonishing feat of memory. "When I come to Philadelphia," he says, "I want to avoid stuff that I did before, and to make sure that I include material that seems to be talking about what's happening today."

Does he think Twain would have a thing or two to say to the United States of 2017?

"Ooooh, yeah," says Holbrook. "He'd be in there, slashing right and left." Twain was generally a Republican, although "he was pretty hard on Teddy Roosevelt, who was a pretty good president, in retrospect. What he could not stand were politicians of any party who did not tell the truth, and the unthinking multitudes who voted for them.

"The political party system sounded like a good idea when it was first thought of," Holbrook says, sounding Twainian, "but it has been corrupted from the beginning, and is corrupted even more today, because you can buy so much power, and our politics caters to the person who doesn't really want to think beyond the end of the road he lives on. It's a replay of the Gilded Age," which Twain lambasted in his first novel.

But how do you perform Mark Twain Tonight! in the angrily polarized year of 2017? How do you let Twain be Twain without alienating large parts of your audience?

"You have to put it together so what you're laughing at are human foibles, not specific people," Holbrook says. "Donald Trump has something a lot of people really like; most of the United States is in love with him. There's something about him that appeals to the American character, and you can't dismiss it. I'm talking to the American people, and I have to remember that what I am saying has to be acceptable to people of a lot of different mind-sets. To persuade an audience that something Mark Twain said in 1895 has a tremendous ring of truth to it in 2017, you have to get them to see that the truth is staring us in the face today."

It's that vigorous, fearless truth-telling, Holbrook says, that keeps Twain fresh. "I used to tell lies," his Twain says, "but I've given it up. The field is overrun with amateurs."

That will draw a laugh now as it did a century and a half ago. "The truth can really be funny," Holbrook says. "You hear it so seldom, it can come as a shock."

He connects Twain with Walt Whitman, both of whom "came up at a big turning point for this country, when people were beginning to talk about things they couldn't talk about before." That includes Whitman's exploration of sexuality and Twain's searing indictments of political corruption and racial oppression. "Twain did it with humor," Holbrook says. "He'd grown up with that frontier humor culture, where folks constantly used humor to persuade each other; as he moved West, that culture moved with him."

Humor, truth, and the direct, sociable American language: These make Twain funny and ever-relevant. "That's why he never grows old," Holbrook says. "Nothing about him grows out of date. He understood us. He got us."

Hal Holbrook in Mark Twain Tonight! 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Merriam Theater, 250 S. Broad St. Tickets: $49-$79. Information: 215-893-1999, kimmelcenter.org.