To change hearts and minds, you often have to meet people where they're at.

Emmy-winning actor Richard Thomas is doing just that. He's hit the road, visiting thousands of people across the United States in his latest life-affirming project: assuming the mantle of Hal Holbook's Mark Twain Tonight! 

Thomas is the first and only actor currently authorized to perform the play, written and originally performed by the legendary late actor (who won a Tony for playing Twain). In taking on the role, Thomas is expected not only to fill the formidable shoes of Twain, but also to keep Holbrook's magnum opus alive.

"This was Hal's life's work, absolutely," Thomas states, "He played Twain for more than 50 years. We had a wonderful collegial relationship, and we liked and admired each other very much, so I was thrilled when the estate reached out. It's important to keep it going, not just for Hal, but for Mark Twain as well."

The solo show brings Twain back to life for audiences through a series of recreated jokes, speeches, and anecdotes: Mark Twain Tonight! is widely acknowledged as the play that birthed the flood of solo biographical shows throughout the latter half of the 20th century.

"I saw Hal's 1967 PBS performance of it when I was 16, and I never forgot it. It echoes in my psyche all the time, Hal on one shoulder, and Twain on the other..." Thomas shakes his head, smiling. "and yet, when it comes time to be an actor and get out on stage and give your performance and make it your own, I can't really worry about all that. Becoming someone else like this, it's... Well, it's certainly a challenge."

Thomas was two thirds of the way through the national tour of To Kill a Mockingbird when he first received the summons from Halbrook's estate. Leading Mockingbird as Atticus Finch had unwittingly prepared Thomas to play Twain, training him to be a great orator in the Southern fashion. "Twain's novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is connected to To Kill a Mockingbird in so many ways. Twain, like Harper Lee, gets pushback from the right and the left, which is really a good quality. I think that if you can get pushback from both sides of the status quo, you're doing the right thing."

While Twain died more than a century ago, he continues to be lifted up as one of the greatest writers in American history. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens to a working family in pre-Civil War Missouri, he had a front-row seat to the ravages of the American slave trade, initially training as a typesetter and printer before shifting his focus to steamboat piloting, where he picked up his pen-name Mark Twain, the leadsman's cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he was briefly enlisted in a local Confederate unit before he fled to the Nevada Territory, where he failed as a miner and ended up a journalist.

Originally a humorist and travel writer, Twain's wife Olivia Langdon connected her husband to the post-war abolition movement, introducing him to "socialists, principled atheists, and activists for women's rights and social equality" that included Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Inspired by those he had met on his travels, and his new acquaintances, Twain became an ardent chronicler of the "murderous acts of mankind." Specializing in social criticism, his insights into the hypocrisy of American society, the wrongs levied against minorities in this country, and the rot threaded through our political system drew fury from conservatives and liberals alike, who balked at the mirror Twain held to their vanity.

"People know Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but not the full panoply of Twain's genius as a satirist, humorous novelist, nonfiction writer, travel writer and performer," Thomas sighs. "Twain is the great mirror up to our nature, warts and all, including himself. He doesn't exempt himself from any reproach. Twain is always relevant for Americans, because he reflects all of our complexity, our contradictions, our grand aspirations, how far short we fall, how we try to make it right, how we grow and learn and evolve emotionally and socially."

Thomas leans forward, his hands grasping at air as he pulls a thread from his mind. "I mean, you know, you can look at Huck Finn as not only the evolution of a boy in slave-holding Missouri in the middle of the 19th century. But you can also read it as Twain's own evolution in terms of his understanding of race in America and his social consciousness. And, indeed, not just Huck's evolution, and not just Twain's, but the country's evolution. His growth towards being a suffragist and really very ardent proto-feminist, and his anti imperialism, his very hard look at organized religion and all of those things moving in an evolutionary way... And certainly, Huck Finn has been misread and misunderstood profoundly from all angles, and yet it remains so much more than a darling story about a boy and a man on a raft. Hemingway said that 'American literature begins with Huckleberry Finn.' And I think he was dead on."

In Mark Twain Tonight!, Thomas is charged with recreating one of Twain's legendary speaking engagements, when he would speak at length to the common man. No two engagements were ever the same, and the same can be said for Mark Twain Tonight!

"Hal didn't write a play," Thomas states definitively. "He curated and edited and put together all this wonderful Twain material. What I have inherited is a marvelous deck of cards that I can learn and shuffle and weave together however I see fit. Hal had 50-plus years to learn everything Twain ever wrote, and get comfortable with it. I had a couple months. So I had to learn it like a show, at first, picking the material I would start with. But now that that is in my bones, I'm starting to learn other pieces, and as I get confident enough, I swap them in and out the way he did. It's Twain's words, but it's also an open form, and it gives whoever is playing it a very free hand in terms of creating the piece as it goes along. You can mix and match it your own way, depending on the audience in front of you."

That ability to shape the clay of Twain's words from night to night makes Mark Twain Tonight! a vessel through which Thomas can directly address his audience, meeting them wherever they are at on any given day. "The audience is always a scene partner, even when you're doing a play with 26 other actors. But in this show, the audience is your only scene partner, and that's really fun. I'm really enjoying how direct the address of this is, as I try to forge a relationship with a different group of people every night." 

While every night varies, he is particularly struck by how different the reactions are from city to city. "In some communities, when I talk about how 'there's only one good sex, the female. It takes a lot to convince the average man of everything, and perhaps nothing can ever make him realize he's the average woman's inferior.' Sometimes that gets cheers, and sometimes you can hear a pin drop. It gets dead silent, depending on where I am. And when I say 'I had not expected the monarchy to come so soon, but it is here, and it is sitting on the throne,' that gets a very different response, depending on what part of the country I'm in ... Twain is so warm that even when he's stirring the pot, people sense his humanity. And I think that's the great bridge between me and the audience, no matter what the topic is. Because even if I'm saying something that might upset them, either politically or about religion or about mankind or whatever, they take it as something coming from a very warm human being who really wants to communicate these things. And when he scolds, he always scolds with a sense of humor, so that people can hear the things that disturb them with a little bit more of an open mind, and a listening ear."

While he has a firm grasp on the language, and a good view of the chess board, the performance cannot begin without Thomas visually transforming into Twain; as literacy rates drop across the country, the image of Twain has become equal in recognition to his words. 

"There could be no better term for it than Twain drag," Thomas laughs. "There's the suit, and the tie pin, and the glorious wig made by Luc Verschueren. The eyebrows are mine, which is great, I'm just growing my Welsh eyebrows out as far as they can go, that's my own organic contribution to the picture. But really, it's the mustache. When the mustache goes on, I look in the mirror and I go, 'there you are.' I don't look exactly like Twain, but I'm telling you, I feel like I look like Twain when I'm doing it. It's the mustache, it really is."

Thomas's commitment to the piece is not intended to be brief: he will continue the current tour through early 2026. Then he will return to Broadway for The Balusters beginning March 31, and then head right back out on tour when the limited run of the new David Lindsay-Abaire play is completed. As he looks forward to the long stretch of possibilities before him, he has a very important message for his audiences.

"I want them to rediscover Twain, and I want them to understand that he belongs to them. He belongs to all of us, warts and all ... He is speaking to you as a fellow American across 191 years. The things that he had to say about government and about Congress and about religion and about race are really, really pertinent. When he talks about the monarchy of the rich and powerful sitting on the throne, it's absolutely late-19th-century Twain speaking about the Gilded Age, but he's also speaking to us in this moment, right now. We just keep making the same mistakes over and over, and I feel very strongly that, while the show is enormously entertaining, his words are what you need to take home. He's so funny and so smart and so engaging, and the way he talks to people through his writing, that's real. He's a real provocateur for change."

For more information, visit TwainPlay.com.