Hal Holbrook: Ever the Twain

Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain

Just finished Hal Holbrook’s “Harold: The Boy Who Would Become Mark Twain.” His chancy childhood — a vanished mother, a mentally unstable father, a coquettish grandmother and a devoted oak of a grandfather — fed those identity questions from which great performances can be born.

His life was soap operatic when he was on a live TV soap opera, “The Brighter Day,” guiltily indulging in an affair with his onscreen paramour to warm himself against the existential chill that had settled over his marriage. His life was adventurous when he countered professional and personal obstacles with self-imposed challenges, like the solo climb up Mount Shasta that came close to killing him. Even the exhaustive list of the play dates he crisscrossed a two-lane nation to play suggest the nervous tedium that tests the bravery and endurance of the working actor. And then there’s the climax, revivifying Mark Twain — the process of discovering ever-deeper insights inside the humorist-sage, the terror of creating and carrying a solo show, the eye-blinking, hide-the-tears amazement when the reviews from the New York critics turn out to be a tidal wave of raves.