\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe final piece on the program is \u201cMark Twain Shouldn\u2019t Say Such Things,\u201d which was written by Dick Scanlan and Marc Kudisch. Kudisch stars in the piece while Scanlan directs. The play will be performed Friday at 7 p.m. Sunday at 4 p.m. at the Wheeler Opera House.<\/p>\n
The Mark Twain that most audiences are familiar with is an older version, when he was well established as one of the greatest American authors and the most celebrated social commentator of the latter half of the 19th century.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hal Holbrook\u2019s one man show \u201cMark Twain Tonight!\u201d first premiered in 1956 and portrayed Twain as a writer and a person, which reinvigorated the author\u2019s legacy. It was performed on Broadway and on television over the next 20 years. A few years ago, Kudisch was approached about reviving Holbrook\u2019s show.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was approached with redoing Holbrook\u2019s \u2018Mark Twain Tonight\u2019 I said, \u2018Hal Holbrook was a genius, he did it. He reinvigorated our idea of Mark Twain\u2019s writing and his physical person,\u2019 but I was not interested in doing what someone had already done,\u201d Kudisch said. \u201cI wanted to find a moment in Twain\u2019s life when he was younger and not quite the icon he became. I honed in on this moment when he was on tour in 1884-85 as he was trying to get \u2018Huck Finn\u2019 published.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kudisch teamed up with his longtime friend Dick Scanlan, who co-wrote the book and was the lyricist of the 2002 musical \u201cThoroughly Modern Millie,\u201d which Kudisch had played the lead in. \u201cMillie\u201d won the Tony for best musical and Kudisch won best performance by an actor in a musical.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was very wary because I didn\u2019t know a lot about Mark Twain,\u201d Scanlan said. \u201cWhat I did know is that he was very careful and deliberate with his persona. He was one of the first celebrities. Those kinds of people, they can be hard to research. I was interested in finding humanity in Twain. But I am so fond of Marc that I wanted to do it and collaborate with him.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the play, Twain is touring on a train promoting his new novel \u201cAdventures of Huckleberry Finn.\u201d Twain is accompanied on the tour by a surprisingly progressive southern writer named George Cable.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwain\u201d is set in the heart of Reconstruction when it was quite apparent that the Emancipation Proclamation was a failure that was not addressing the plight of American blacks for whom it was designed to help.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Twain was an outspoken opponent of slavery and society\u2019s post-war failures to address how black were treated. Twain filtered his view of race through satire.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTwain articulated any controversial view as satire so he could disavow it later if he wanted,\u201d Kudisch said. \u201cThrough satire he could dig into a deeper conversation and he could always back off later and say, \u2018that was said in fun.\u2019 Cable was completely earnest in his opinions which were surprisingly progressive seeing he was a former Confederate soldier from the south.\u201d<\/p>\n
Twain and Cable became quite close and when Cable left the tour, Twain found himself vulnerable. \u201cHe was a little bit broken,\u201d Scanlan said. \u201cTwain has never been presented that way. We all have moments where we\u2019re broken and vulnerable and it was interesting to create that with Twain and we have a great actor who can pull that off.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.aspendailynews.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dick Scanlan is the co-writer and director of\u00a0\u201cMark Twain Shouldn\u2019t Say Such Things\u201d which is a part of the fourth annual Solo Flights Festival by Theatre Aspen. It is the lone play showing at the Wheeler Opera House with performances Friday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m.\u00a0 Courtesy of Theatre Aspen Last night, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1994327,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1994326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Solo-Flights-fest-takes-off-Arts-Entertainment.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1994326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1994326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1994327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1994326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1994326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1994326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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