Actor Richard Thomas first rose to fame as John-Boy Walton in the Emmy-winning series The Waltons (1973–1981), a role that made him a household name and launched a career spanning decades across film, television, and theater.
Stage success, however, came even earlier. Born into show business — the son of the founders of the New York School of Ballet — Thomas made his Broadway debut at age seven in Sunrise at Campobello (1958) and has remained a Broadway mainstay ever since. His recent stage credits include Mr. Webb in the star-studded revival of Our Town, a Tony-nominated turn in The Little Foxes (2017), and a leading role as Atticus Finch in the 2022 national tour of Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
Now, Thomas returns to Washington, DC, for a two-night engagement of Mark Twain Tonight!, the one-man show created by Hal Holbrook in 1954. Holbrook performed the piece — a dramatized evening with Twain, drawn entirely from the author’s own writings — for more than six decades until shortly before his death in 2021.
The production also marks a homecoming for Thomas: he last appeared at DC’s National Theatre as an 8-year-old in Sunrise at Campobello, when the show toured after its Broadway run.
DCTA spoke to Thomas about his playing Mark Twain, his love for the American theater, and the pros and cons of life on tour. This conversation has been condensed for clarity and brevity.
You are the first and only person that the Holbrook Estate has authorized to play this role since Hal Holbrook’s passing. How did you get involved in the production?
Hal Holbrook’s estate reached out to me during the tour of To Kill a Mockingbird. Hal was a collegial friend of mine, and his estate said he would have been happy for me to play the role based on my other work and on our mutual admiration.
What have you learned about Mark Twain in preparing to play this role?
Actors are avid researchers. Give us a historical character or something to investigate, and we will go down the rabbit hole. I am on my third Twain biography right now. I had read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn both when I was doing the Mockingbird tour, and I fell in love with both of them all over again. The great thing about playing Mark Twain and reading his work on the road is that you feel like he’s right there traveling with you. He’s so forthcoming about himself as a person in his writing. He put his whole personality on display in his writings and in his lectures, and it makes it fun to embody him. You don’t have to invent much. He’s putting himself right there on the paper for you.
Hal Holbrook played this role for over six decades, from the time he was in college until 2017, five years before his death. Those are also some big shoes to fill.
The longevity of this show is a testament to Hal Holbrook’s abilities as a performer and how he put this piece together. It’s not a play script; it’s a collection of materials that he curated from Twain’s writings. He would take a piece from this and add it to that and create a bridge from subject to subject. It’s like a deck of cards. You can reshuffle. And he did that over the years. He would learn new things, put new things in, take things out, depending on what was going on. I don’t have that luxury, so I based my work on his 1967 PBS televised performance as a starting point, and then I added and removed stuff and moved things around. My performance, I’m sure, will be quite different from Hal’s, which is unavoidable. But Mark Twain is a big tent, and there are lots of opportunities.
What gives this show its staying power?
It begins with Twain, of course. He is just a quintessentially American figure who stands right at the watershed of the beginning of American literature in the 19th century. Mark Twain was the first writer to begin writing and speaking in a language that Americans spoke, not just in their best efforts to write good European prose.
Also, as a character, he embodies us as Americans. The evolution of his social consciousness mirrors that of the country in so many ways. As he evolved and became more progressive and inclusive in his social ideas, so did the country. We see ourselves in him.
What is your favorite thing about Mark Twain?
His humor. He’s not a curmudgeon, but he’s definitely a provocateur. It’s a humor of inversion, taking what you would expect and turning it upside down. And in that sense, his ability to provoke is really rich.
I also like his humanity. I like his warts and his contradictions because they are the contradictions of America. For example, he could be a real Victorian about women, but he was also a really avid early feminist and suffragist. He was always going on the warpath against corporations, insurance companies, and oligarchies, but he spent his whole life trying to be a mogul. His feelings about religion and authority were very conflicted and complex. It’s amazing how salient his work is right now. People come up to me every night and ask if I added the part about “the monarchy of the rich and powerful sitting on the throne of the country.” They will say, “Did you add that?” And I say, “No, that’s all Twain.”
You have had a very successful screen career. What keeps you coming back to the American stage?
I have an affinity for the stage which goes way back to spending my whole infancy and toddlerhood backstage at the ballet where my parents were performing. I love the community coming together for a play, both the artists and the audience. If you do a TV show, you meet other actors at the wrap party that you’ve never met before, but when you’re doing a theater piece, the whole company comes together to tell the story together. There is nothing like it. It gives me a lot of pleasure.
The touring production of To Kill a Mockingbird that you recently headlined was very successful. What’s it like to be on the road with a show?
Touring has been a big part of my life, and unlike a lot of people, I like the road a lot. There is a primal feeling when you pull up stakes and move to the next town, like a circus. You aren’t playing for tourists when you tour. You are playing for people in their own home theater. In many cases across the country, local audience members have saved their historic theaters from destruction. So there is a particular municipal pride that people feel when they go to their home theater and that is a very rewarding thing. And when you are traveling with a company, touring creates an incredible bond. This one is a little different; it’s me and my wife and my stage manager, but that just means it’s fresh again.
Mark Twain also famously traveled the country on his lecture tours. Will you be visiting any of the places he visited?
I’m basically doing what Hal did, and Hal did what Twain did. We are all doing the same thing. Twain called them lectures and he would put them together and take them all over the country. He played in all kinds of venues, just like Hal did. Hal did stuff in high school gymnasiums and community centers, as well as theaters. So many of the cities where we are playing are places that Twain performed back in the day. We are really retracing his steps in a lot of ways.
Mark Twain Tonight! plays September 20, 2025, at 7:30 pm and September 21, 2025, at 2:00 pm at The National Theatre, 1321 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC. Tickets start at $29 and are available at the National Theatre box office or online at BroadwayAtTheNational.com. Box Office hours are Monday through Friday 12:00-6:00pm with extended evening and weekend hours during performance days.
Richard Thomas in
Mark Twain Tonight!
By Hal Holbrook
SEE ALSO:
Richard Thomas to star in ‘Mark Twain Tonight!’ at National Theatre (news story, August 13, 2025)
