For One Night, Richard Thomas Brings Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Back to New York

“Who’s the bigger fool,” Richard Thomas muses, “the person who, as I did, agrees to take it on, or the guy who turns it down?”

That question was at the forefront of Thomas’s mind for a split second when he was approached to star in a new touring engagement of Mark Twain Tonight. “[Producer] Orin [Wolf] said, ‘I got a call from Hal Holbrook’s estate,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.'”

Thomas as Twain is a canny bit of casting that just makes sense. “I guess it’s the connection of me with a certain American mode,” he says, alluding to the role that made him famous as a young man, John-Boy Walton (and let’s not forget the recent years he spent touring as Atticus Finch). But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a challenge.

On November 2, Thomas will perform the play in New York for the first time, as a benefit for the Entertainment Community Fund, before embarking on his second year on the road as Twain in early 2027. “When I received the material, it felt so natural to me,” Thomas says. “I thought that I may succeed, I may fail, but it feels strangely comfortable. I had to put my head down and go forward.” “But,” he adds, “I couldn’t look down, because I’d be like, ‘What are you doing? You’re out of your mind!'”

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Hal did Mark Twain Tonight! thousands of times over the years in differing versions. Is there a definitive script that you’re performing?
No, there isn’t. You can make it a little bit of a “choose your own adventure.” He did an incredible job over many decades of compiling the stuff, curating it, editing it, putting it somewhere else. You inherit these blocks of text, and you can reshape them, take things out. He had the advantage over me because he did this over decades. I’m just going out for my second season. I didn’t really have time to build it from scratch.

Among the things they sent me was the script of the 1967 television broadcast, so I used that as a template to start because I needed a structure. There was a lot going on in Vietnam when that was done, and some things seemed more topical then than now, so I took a few things out, added stuff, and stitched a few things together using all the texts that were there, and it seems to work well. I have switched some things out over the course of the tour, the way he did, and I’ll add some things for New York.

It isn’t a finished script, and that’s not to throw shade at it at all. What he did was create this beautiful open form, so that the actor has a kind of, if not an authorial participation, an editorial one. You feel you can make it your own. And the beauty of it for me is not just that I get to do it, but that at a certain point, maybe other actors will get to do it.

Intellectually, what is it like to speak Twain’s words in the world of 2026?
He’s such an extraordinary mirror of the American psyche and the American character, with all of its contradictions, flaws, and virtues. It’s like showing people a picture of themselves. This is who we are. This is where we came from. This is where we fucked up. This is how we figured it out. He doesn’t pull any punches. When you take the show on the road in different parts of the country, people respond very differently to different material.

You’re one of the few stars who still actively tours.
I am a missionary. I really am. I love doing it. It’s very challenging. It’s not for everybody. But touring is a unique and extraordinary way to be an actor, and if you’re in the right show with the right people on the right kind of tour, it’s absolutely a marvelous experience. And getting plays on the road is very important to me because there are so many people who come to see a play on the road who’ve never seen a play. They’ve seen musicals galore. But plays used to tour all the time, and they don’t anymore. It’s terrific to get plays on the road. That’s a big part of it for me.

One of the fun things is that I’m not only following in Hal’s footsteps, but Hal would kind of follow Twain’s footsteps. I’ve been in many venues where Twain and Hal both played. There’ve been several chairs I’ve sat in that Hal sat in, and several lecterns I’ve used that Hal autographed. It’s extremely cool.

It will be nice to do it for the home folks [in New York], where more people will be bringing Hal into the room with them because of their familiarity with what he did. I hope that Hal will be out there with me as a benign presence and that people will be able to enjoy it anew. But I do look forward to going back on the road because I want people all over the country to sort of reacquaint themselves with Twain. It’s important to get Twain out there. People will come up to me and say, “Did you write that and put that in?” And I’d say, “No, that’s from the golden age.”

History doesn’t repeat itself, as Twain said.
Yeah. It rhymes. There’s a whole lot of rhyming in this show.