New Performer

Mark Twain Tonight! The stage is a faded daguerreotype, with a high, old-fashioned lectern, a desk with a topply mound of books and a cut-glass pitcher of water, a McKinley-era chair. Into this setting shuffles the spry, white-maned humorist in the white suit. Involuntary tremors ripple the stiffened fingers, the lower jaw nibbles spasmodically at wisps of tobacco-stained mustache, the shoulders twitch like marionettes in the invisible hands of time. But a pagan glint of eye suggests that this is a life less spent than well spent. Then the voice, cracked but not ruined, speaks, and the evening begins showering comic sparks.

Is getting up with the lark good advice for the young? Yes, agrees Mark Twain slyly, "if you get yourself the right kind of a lark and work him right, you can easily train him to get up at 9:30 every time." What about bad habits? Twain is an expert on giving up smoking: "I can give it up whenever I want to. I've done it a thousand times." Why is he wearing a white suit? "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society." Wielding the satiric pinpoint that is sometimes more deadly than the sword, Twain proceeds to let the hot air out of do-gooders, religious humbugs and assorted hokum peddlers. To vary the pace, there are tall tales, a ghost story, an acted-out fragment from Huckleberry Finn. The humorist even prophesies his own death with the return of Halley's comet (1910): "The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together; they must go out together.' "

The brilliant re-creator of Mark Twain as a septuagenarian platform lecturer is 34-year-old Hal Holbrook making his New York stage debut. An avid Twain buff since college days, TV Actor (Grayling Dennis on the CBS serial The Brighter Day, for six years) Holbrook has expertly culled Twain's speeches, autobiography and stories for his program. What emerges is no mellow dodderer, but a caustic sage brimming with skeptic laughter.

The aura of age in Actor Holbrook's manner heightens what is ageless in Mark Twain's humor. Lighting a cigar with a furious putt-putt-putt, Holbrook spaces the tagline of a tall story from an afterthought that howlingly tops it. His performance is as pungently authoritative as the smoke from Twain's omnipresent cigar--a cigar that Actor Holbrook flourishes like a wand over two hours of delightfully recaptured Americana.

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