Found this interview with Hal Holbrook in the Los Angeles Times from 2010.  We host him at Live Talks Los Angeles on September 8 at Track 16 in Santa Monica. A couple questions of interest on how Twain is relevant today….Here’s an excerpt:

You’ve been playing Mark Twain on stage for more than 40 years. What does the role mean to you now and how do you keep the character fresh?

The easiest way to describe what it means to me is like this — when I sit in a hotel room, listening to the news, and listening to the idiots blabber in what they like to call “news” … if I didn’t have Twain to go on stage and attack this kind of foolishness, I would end up in the nuthouse.

In what ways is Twain relevant today?

The role gives me the opportunity to hit certain targets that need to be hit. I didn’t have to update the material and I still don’t have to. Let me recite to you something that he wrote about big business — he once described the behavior that goes on there as “the limitless rottenness of our financial institutions on Wall Street where theft has been practiced as a profession by our most influential commercial men.”