Note: The following interview was first published in 2015. Holbrook returned to Denver for a 12th time in April to perform his signature show, ‘Mark Twain Tonight.’ Today (Sept. 14, 2017), Holbrook, at age 92, announced he will no longer play the role live onstage – after 63 years. In honor, we’re re-posting our most recent interview.

America: Hal Holbrook would like to have a little talk

By John Moore
DCPA Senior Arts Journalist

What we have here in America, the enduring actor Hal Holbrook believes, is a failure to communicate.

It’s not that we’re not talking. It’s that we’re not talking to each other. Unless it’s to our own kind.

“People are afraid to talk openly about politics today,” Holbrook told the DCPA NewsCenter. “We have become so nervous about offending anyone’s opinion. Plus, we have so many ridiculous opinions circulating on the cyber-circuits that to deal with political opinion today is not only chancy; you are just going to turn people off and scare them.” 

But Holbrook, as the world has well-known these past 92 years, is not afraid to talk. Either as himself, or as the alter ego he has lived with for seven decades now. Holbrook returns to Denver on April 1 to perform for the 12^th time Mark Twain Tonight, the second-most presented show in DCPA history (Sorry, Hal: You can’t touch A Christmas Carol. Yet.)

Holbrook is talking, all right. Just as Twain might if he had not had the bad form to die as a whippersnapper of just 75. He’s talking about the gun culture. About religious hypocrisy. About racism. About abuse of power by police. (He’s experienced it, too, he says.) He’s even talking about the legalization of marijuana in Colorado.

“What is going on in the world today is dangerous,” he says. And not just in Syria and France and Africa. Right here at home. But what’s most dangerous, says America’s modern-day Will Rogers, is what will surely come to pass if we don’t start talking about it openly. Forget congress. (They’re beyond hope, he says.) Forget the “yacky, yacky yack” televangical opinion-makers on Fox or MSNBC. (They are all talking so fast, you can’t follow them anyway,” he says.)

No, the onus is on the real and regular people of America to start talking to one another again, Holbrook says. At the dinner table, in churches and at taverns. More important, we have to learn all over again how to listen. 

“We are living in a world where there is a terrible religious war underway, and it has been brewing for a long time,” Holbrook said. “And if we aren’t able to talk about it without taking partisan sides, we’re in deep trouble. Because we have something really golden in this country, which is the tradition of being able to have your own idea about something. And being able to express it. And if we go hiding that in the closet, and suppress it, you can just imagine what kind of world we are heading into.” 

But into this culture of animosity and hostility and division, we still have, through Holbrook, an immortalized Mark Twain going out into every corner of America talking about who we were and what we were thinking 100 years ago. And in doing so, he is in some strange way touching on who we are and what we are thinking now.

When Holbrook walks out on stage sporting Twain’s trademark white suit, wild white hair and indelible witticisms, it’s like being sat down by your grandfather’s grandfather for a good talking to. 

More Colorado theatre coverage on the DCPA NewsCenter

“I am so grateful that I still have this Mark Twain show; that I never gave it up; that I never got tired of it,” said Holbrook, who has performed Mark Twain Tonight nearly 2,600 times in all 50 states, 20 countries and behind the Iron Curtain. “It gives me a tremendous feeling of moving forward. It gives me energy. I love doing the show, and I love the challenge of trying to talk to people today about what is going on in our world.”

Although the show is always 100 percent Twain, it is always changing. Holbrook promises Denver audiences will see some new material since his last visit here in 2015. For his 2013 visit, he added a new number from Huckleberry Finn that recounts the comic family feud between the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons, who have been fighting for so long, no one can remember why it began in the first place. “Strangely enough,” Holbrook says, “it has something powerful to say about the gun culture today and our love affair with guns.

“I have another new piece that I think was pretty chancy to add in, and that has to do with Mark Twain’s thoughts on the Christian Bible. It’s about how people use the Bible without even understanding what Jesus is saying in it. And I am telling you, it is right on the nose. As a religious nation, we have a tremendous lack of understanding of what Jesus Christ is telling us. We turn it into something else and make a mess of it. That’s what happens when you marry politics to religion. That’s what we’ve done, and it is creating a big problem in this country. Politics and religion do not go well together.”

These are dicey, controversial topics of conversation. But no matter your politics, the dialogue somehow flows more easily when America’s most beloved, cigar-chomping humorist is leading it. Holbrook has voted for both Democrat and Republican presidents – and he’s been alive for every one of them since Calvin Coolidge. Growing up, his family was conservative. “But I was born with a question mark on my head, so I can’t be a Republican,” he says. Like Twain, he hails from the party of common sense.

And right now, his common sense is telling him that America will live in shame for decades for the way it has treated [now former] President Barack Obama. And he doesn’t exonerate the left in that assessment.

“My thoughts begin with this powerful realization that Barack Obama was elected in 2008 with the largest number of popular votes ever given to any U.S. president (69.5 million). It was as close to a landslide as you can get,” he said. “The very next day, the opposing party announced very clearly and very prominently that their one goal in the next four years would be to get rid of the man we had just elected by the largest number of votes ever given to any president in U.S. history. That, to me, was unforgivable. Obama has been under a bombardment like no president I have ever seen. No one has ever been shot at and attacked the way he has.”

What’s more important than Obama being picked on is the underlying reason Holbrook believes he is being picked on — and how that unmasks the greatest problem facing America today.

“Obama has accomplished an amazing amount in the past six years – and nobody is talking about it,” Holbrook said in 2015. “Not even the Democrats are standing up for him. And why is that? If this guy is achieving all this good stuff against such tremendous odds, why aren’t the people in his own party standing up for him? There is one element that comes into this whole picture, which all of us try to put out of our minds, and that is racism. And the fact that President Obama is black.

“There is such a powerful tide of racism in this country today, and I don’t think we can blind ourselves to that fact.”

It’s that kind of blood-pumping talk that keeps Holbrook getting up in the morning. That keeps him thinking about how to change and improve Mark Twain Tonight when he lies in bed at night. When he swims in the pool. 

“I’m working hard, but when you are 90 years old, there all kinds of thoughts in your head that you’d really like to chase away,” he said. “You can’t sit there and linger on how old you are and worry about dying. You just have to pick up and go.”

In the meantime, he is keeping the conversation going. He and Mark Twain.

“I was writing my son the other day, who is very intelligent and very hard to argue with. He has very strong opinions. I was trying to tell him, ‘David, I think what I have been trying to do with Mark Twain all my life is to make people say to themselves, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s not be too sure about that …’ ” 

The night before Holbrooks last appearance in Denver in  2015, he presented a documentary titled Holbrook/Twain: An American Odyssey at the Sie Film Center. The film shows performance excerpts from Mark Twain Live and includes interviews with Sean Penn, Martin Sheen, Emile Hirsch, Cherry Jones and others.

“It’s really good, I have to say,” he said.

Hal Holbrook in Mark Twain Tonight!: Ticket information
Saturday, April 1
7 p.m.
Buell Theatre
Denver Performing Arts Complex
Tickets: 303-893-4100 or BUY ONLINE

More words of wisdom from Hal Holbrook:

Here are a few excerpts of Holbrook talking about other important subjects:

ON RACE IN AMERICA
“We are watching the whole racial thing happen again, over and over. We have done a great deal to try to solve it since the beginning 300 years ago … but it ain’t solved yet.

ON HIS RECENT RUN-IN WITH POLICE
I think there is as much racism in Missouri as in any state in the union. I know what it’s like when you give some guy a uniform and a gun. I was totally humiliated by a young police officer in Springfield, Mo., just so he can be big stud making an old man go though a whole routine. He followed me because I took a wrong turn on a totally dark road around 11 at night. There was nobody on the road. No traffic. Nothing. He was accusing me of DUI. I hadn’t been drinking for 20 years, and he made me do all kinds of stuff. It was really insulting. Now, if you happen to live in a state where there is a lot of racism when you were growing up, I think it would be childish to dream that a fellow who’s got a uniform on has not carried some of that racism into his adulthood.  We know that now from the actual facts that have come out of the city government in Ferguson. It’s all proved now.

ON OBAMACARE
He introduced a health-insurance program that was long overdue. Every civilized country in the world has had one for their people except the wealthiest country in the world. And then congress got a hold of this bill – and the lobbyists – and I  won’t say they mutilated it, but they certainly made it a lot more complex than it originally was going to be. All that being said, yes, it’s been a terrible mess. I have friends who hate it. But the upside of it is this: Eleven million people now have health insurance because of it. So you cannot dismiss the accomplishment. I think it’s quite extraordinary.

ON CONGRESS
These are basically very dumb people. They would sell their mother for a dollar, and they do it every day down there.

ON THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
I have voted Republican several times in my life. But they have taken this party and they have twisted it in ways that do not help us at all. Did you see the picture of the guy from Arkansas (Tom Cotton) who wrote the letter to the Ayatollah in Iran? Have you seen his picture? He looks like a 28-year-old kid. This guy is a thinker? This is somebody we are supposed to admire?

ON THE LEGALIZATION OF MARIJUANA IN COLORADO
People are not going to like hearing me say this, but it doesn’t make sense to me to think that somebody who is smoking marijuana is not going to have his judgment affected somewhat – maybe a lot – while driving. I don’t want to be killed, and I don’t want my grandson who is just turning 18 in April and is going to be driving all the way across this country to live in California – to be killed. I want to tell you, the people in California are driving more and more crazy every day. They are doing things I have never seen done before. I’m not kidding. Now I don’t know whether they are on some drugs or what, but they have no respect for the rules of the road anymore. I smoked pot a couple of times in my life, OK? I didn’t like it. I was doing a show once when my second marriage was breaking up, and I was having an affair with this sexy girl who was on the show. She was much younger and she was into all kinds of things like EST. So another friend wanted us to come over and smoke marijuana, and I said, “I don’t want to smoke marijuana.” They said, “Oh, Hal, you’ve gotta loosen up. We want you to take a few puffs of marijuana.” So I said, ‘Oh hell, all right, all right, all right, c’mon…” And I smoked a couple puffs. Now (my girlfriend) says to me, “I want us to tell the truth about what we feel about each other. Tell the truth about what you think of me, Hal!” And I said, “OK: I think you’re a nut!” And she got mad and left the room.  So, that’s what I think about marijuana: It’ll free you up, all right. But it’s not safe!”

ON DCPA FOUNDER DONALD R. SEAWELL, WHO HAS SINCE DIED AT 103:
He’s such a remarkable gentleman in the true sense of the word. He is powerful in his positive feeling about his ability to keep going. That is the best medicine you possibly can have when you start to get into your 90s.

ON THE 2010 DEATH OF HIS WIFE, DIXIE CARTER
I think of her every minute of the day. I can constantly hear her talking to me. And it’s rearranging my idea of where heaven is. I think it’s right around here. Her presence is constantly here in this house. And so, it’s very, very hard for me to make peace. Not only with losing someone you love. But it’s very hard for me to make peace with how you justify taking someone away who was not only so full of life, but also all that talent and kindness and good feeling for people. But at the same time, I have to remember that Dixie was a very sincere Christian. She did not preach it. She just lived it. She respected everybody. That, to me, is the kind of Christian I like.     

Hal Holbrook at the Sie Film Center in 2015. Photo by John Moore for the DCPA NewsCenter.