Hal Holbrook channels Mark Twain in new show

Hal Holbrook has a quibble with the folks who present the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, awarded to comedians such as Ellen DeGeneres, Will Ferrell, and most recently, Carol Burnett.

"They give this Mark Twain prize business, they treat him like a comedian. . . . but you can't just dismiss him as funny," says Holbrook, 88, the Tony- and Emmy-winning actor who is performing his one-man show, "Mark Twain Tonight!" Saturday at Tilles Center for the Performing Arts in Brookville. Besides being a social critic, Twain was "one of the great literary figures of the last 150 years," Holbrook says in a phone interview from Manhattan's Hotel Beacon.

Recently seen on film as the presidential emissary Preston Blair in Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" (2012), and with a resumé that also includes Deep Throat in "All the President's Men" (1976), Holbrook says he continually returns to Twain because "like Shakespeare, when he said something, it rings down the centuries as the truth."

EPIC FIGURE

Holbrook probably knows Twain's truths better than anyone else alive, having played the author of "Huckleberry Finn" and other literary classics for going on 60 years. (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who died in 1910, wrote and performed under the Mark Twain pseudonym for 47 years). Holbrook began assembling Twain's writings into a show in 1954, when he was an out-of-work young actor seeking a "way to put bread on the table." But he quickly realized the power of Twain's ideas to audiences during the budding civil rights movement.

In his current tour, Holbrook continues to introduce fresh material from the Twain canon, which he hopes "will say something about what's going on in the country." For instance, he's recently added "a number" on the "Christian Bible and our use of it or misuse of it." In including such material, Holbrook says, "I had Dixie looking over my shoulder," referring to his late wife, Dixie Carter, who died in 2010 and was best known for playing Julia Sugarbaker in the CBS sitcom "Designing Women." "She was the kind of Christian you would hope people would be -- she didn't go around preaching, she just lived being a decent person," Holbrook explains.

Holbrook says his goal with the show has remained the same over the decades: entertaining audiences by making them laugh and think at the same time, while staying completely faithful to his source.

Says Holbrook: "I don't update the material, I never have updated it, I never try to pretend that he's anything but Mark Twain speaking in 1905."