Theater: The Funniest Lies

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Mark Twain Tonight! Hal Holbrook spends 31 hours putting on his Mark Twain makeup, but he has spent 13 years getting into Mark Twain's psyche. What began as an extraordinary physical likeness has become a communion of spirit, a marriage of two minds, a shared inner mirth at man's foibles that approaches philosophy.

Holbrook, who has crisscrossed the U.S. and Europe in this one-man show, brings it to Broadway with much fresh material culled from Twain's writings. The casual format is that of one of Twain's turn-of-the-century lectures when he was 70. The props are simple: a lectern, a Victorian chair, a pitcher of water, an omnipresent cigar from which Holbrook fires volleys of smoke like a snow-thatched Jove who has laid aside his thunderbolts for cheroots.

The real thunderbolts are the words, the wit, and the ever-skeptical cast of mind. Twain knew that the lies people tell themselves are much funnier than the lies they tell others. He had a bird dog's nose for humbug, and he found it everywhere—in religion, patriotism, politics, ethnic pride and national vanity. With baffled awe and unquenchable laughter, he looked upon man as the most arrogant of the apes and found him passing strange: "Man is the only animal who's got the true religion—several of 'em." Twain wonders aloud if mankind would not have been better off if Noah had missed the Ark: "To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French."

Twain could be cruelly funny; in one tale a man, caught in a textile machine, gets woven into 39 yards of carpeting. Together with wry homilies ("Temperate temperance is best") Holbrook includes a ghost story, a fragment from Huckleberry Finn, and passages of the purest poetry, such as a description of dawn rising on the Mississippi, a fond remembrance of Twain's youth as a riverboat pilot. It is not youth but age that is the touchstone of Holbrook's marvelously timed acting command of the role. He knows that an old man does not collect his thoughts but wool-gathers them, that an old man's legs do not walk but must be lifted, that an old man's hands twitch vagrantly like an infant's in sleep, that an old man's eyes sometimes glow like blown embers and sometimes fade out as swiftly and secretly as dusk. Yet within this fraying husk of age, the man from Hannibal stands vibrantly whole, incorrigibly acute, a genius of uncommon sense.