Eugene Field House Foundation Presents Hal Holbrook Mark Twain Tonight!

The Eugene Field House Foundation hosted a VIP guest cocktail reception at The Touhill  Performing Arts Center, University of Missouri St. Louis campus, prior to Hal Holbrook’s stellar performance of Mark Twain Tonight!, Saturday, April 11, 2015. The special event kicked off the public phase of the Eugene Field House Foundation’s capital campaign and also celebrated Mr. Holbrook’s 90th birthday and remarkable 61st year of continuous performance of his Tony-  and Emmy-award winning one-man play.

Holbrook knows Twain as well as he knows himself, bringing richness to the character far beyond the quoting of Twain’s most memorable lines. His ever-changing selection of material from Twain’s vast body of work coincided with current events, keeping the show as fresh as ever and amazing audiences with its relevancy to current affairs.

Mark Twain’s last visit to Missouri occurred in 1902 when he stopped in St. Louis to dedicate a marker on the childhood home of his late friend and fellow author, Eugene Field. That visit at the circa 1845 row house, 634 South Broadway, began years of preservation of one of the city’s most historic landmarks, which not only honors Eugene, but also equally recognizes his father Roswell. The patriarch of the family made immeasurable contributions to American civil rights in his legal representation of Dred and Harriet Scott in their pursuit of freedom.

From the Field House’s early days of preservation by the St. Louis City Board of Education during the 1930’s to the children’s “penny campaigns”, the  present foundation seeks to protect further and expand this National Historic Landmark. Welcoming Hal Holbrook back in Mark Twain Tonight! symbolically supported the capital campaign to make the expansion plans a reality in 2015.

As in 2012, Mr. Holbrook recited from some of Mark Twain’s favorite passages and quotations.His work has spearheaded The Mark Twain Project at University of California, Berkeley, which houses Mark Twain’s papers. It perhaps represents the most ambitious publishing enterprise in the annals of American literature, issuing scholarly editions of Mark Twain’s writings comprising a wealth of newly discovered material.