February 18, 2025: Theatre Yesterday and Today, by Ron Fassler

Yesterday marked 100 years since the birth of Harold Rowe Holbrook Jr., the much admired actor whose voluminous work on stage, film, and television garnered him nearly every award imaginable, especially in the theatre. He won a Tony, an Obie (for distinguished work off-Broadway), an Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Drama Desk (back when it was called the Vernon Rice Award), in addition to five Emmys. In 2008, at age 82, he was Oscar-nominated for Into the Wild, at the time the oldest actor to achieve that honor. It wasn't until 10 years later, at the age of 92, that he announced his retirement—not from acting—but from the role with which he had been most identified throughout his long and varied career: his perpetual rendition of Mark Twain, perhaps the finest writer America ever produced. At the time of his announcement, Holbrook had been booked to hit the road for yet another tour of Mark Twain Tonight!, his self-realized one-man show that he first began performing when he was 23. In those early years (and for some time thereafter), in order to transform himself into the 70-ish author, Holbrook endured a 3.5 hour makeup job (more than twice as long as the show itself). Of course, over the years, those hours diminished as actual wrinkles replaced fakes ones that needed application. Taking voluminous research and intensive memorization skills into what was then uncharted territory, his love affair with his alter-ego was both wildly successful and insanely enduring. But after 63 years of performing it off and on, Holbrook finally gave himself permission for a well-earned rest. Sadly, his retirement from the stage was short-lived, as he died of natural causes in 2021 at age 95.

The original impetus for creating Mark Twain as a persona, began as a way for Holbrook to earn money during what are always the consistent downtimes between jobs for any actor. He crafted it himself in order to perform it all on his own. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but it evolved into a passionate lifelong journey, one that has been well chronicled for decades on the deep relationship he has shared with the writer. There is no doubt that the record books will forever highlight his achievement in terms of the staggering number of cities and countries he brought it to throughout the world. But how do you measure the commitment it took to play it more than 2,200 times? How do you gage the emotional, physical and psychological endurance of this singular endeavor?

For one thing, I would always joke that his opening cast parties must have been very lonely affairs.

In 1966, when Holbrook brought Mark Twain Tonight! to Broadway for the first time, he had already been doing it in community halls, high schools and regional theatres for 15 years. At 41, he found himself (at last) the toast of Broadway. The reviews praised his performance (garnering him the Tony for Best Actor in a Play), in which by cracked voice and aged gait, he convincingly forged both the robustness and fragility of the man, winning over critics and scholars alike. He ingeniously interweaved dozens of Twain’s stories throughout the show, an effort which took years of Holbrook’s poring through everything Twain had ever written, committing to memory large sections of text that he would change from night to night. His program for the show never announced a set version, which allowed him to choose from whatever suited him out of the SEVEN HOURS of material he had at his brain’s fingertips (if a brain has fingertips).

As an actor, Holbrook bore a deep hole in my consciousness throughout the 1970s, when, during my teenage years, I saw him take on such roles as a crusading U.S. Senator fighting for justice on the NBC-TV series The Bold Ones; a husband leaving his wife for another man in That Certain Summer, the first TV movie to implicitly deal with the subject of homosexuality; a beautifully modulated Stage Manager in a TV production of Our Town, and finally, unforgettable as Deep Throat, journalists Woodward and Bernstein’s “garage freak” in All the President’s Men.

In 1995 while living in Los Angeles, I got the chance to work with Holbrook in a TV movie. I was to have one line with him, which was more than enough for me, since it would allow me for the rest of my life to claim I acted with one of my heroes. My role was a reporter in a Perry Mason Mystery Movie that was naturally to have starred Raymond Burr in his most famous role. But when he took ill a few weeks prior to shooting, they went and filmed it anyway with Holbrook engaged to play a contemporary of the fictional Mason. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t change a word of dialogue, merely cut and pasting the name “Bill MacKenzie” instead of “Perry Mason,” wherever it occurred in the script.

After we shot the scene, and while the cameras were being reversed (my close-up, thank you very much), I took the opportunity to engage Holbrook in conversation, where I brought up Mark Twain. I asked him why 30 years after it had been shot live in a Broadway theatre, taped for broadcast on CBS, it still wasn’t available on VHS (this before the invention of the DVD a year later).

Holbrook pulled a drag on the cigarette he was smoking and said, “It will be.” Then, with emphasis, he added, “Eventually.”

I pressed further. “Who owns the rights?” I asked.

“I do,” he replied, with a twinkle in his eye, stubbing out the cigarette.

He went on to explain that he was holding out for the best possible deal (smart guy that he was). As the keeper of the flame of everything to do with his uncanny portrait, he wanted to make sure it was done right — and at the right time. True to his word, a DVD was released 4 years later in 1999, whereupon I purchased one. It’s still available at Amazon for $25.49—and it’s well worth it.

Years earlier, in 1959 to be exact, Holbrook published a book on how he came to develop the piece. It’s titled Mark Twain Tonight! An Actors Portrait, and though now out of print, it can be found in used paperback editions pretty easily on line. I managed to track down a hardcover, and it’s a personal treasure.

Holbrook wound up playing Twain for 63 years, nearly as long as the great author had lived on this earth (he died at age 74). Upon his decision to retire his Mark Twain, Holbrook wrote a letter of farewell. Here it is below in its entirety; the final word from this great man of the theatre, at least as it relates to the role of his career:

Ron Fassler is the author of the recently published The Show Goes On: Broadway Hirings, Firings and Replacements. For news and "Theatre Yesterday and Today" columns when they break, please hit the FOLLOW button.