Actor Joe Baer is the star of the solo show Samuel Clemens: Tales of Mark Twain.
“The human race has only one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.” The words are those of Mark Twain, né Samuel Clemens, and the philosophy gets a healthy workout in Samuel Clemens: Tales of Mark Twain, Joe Baer’s one-man retrospective of the life and works—but mostly the life—of America’s great author. Baer loves his subject, and he works up a worthy retelling of Clemens’s life and times. He might have labored harder to carry them into a modern perspective, but it’s still a pleasant, leisurely ride.
Baer lopes down the aisle of the Actors Temple Theater, cordially greeting the audience in Twain’s trademark white suit and loophole tie, a reasonable facsimile of the man. He ascends the stage, which is dressed to a bare minimum by Cynthia Baer, the wife of the author-actor-director: a podium and a chair. Supposedly Clemens is giving a lecture to us modern folk, mainly about him, and that’s understandable: Clemens, all his humble protestations notwithstanding, was far from egoless.
Baer discovered something, and he weren’t surprised. Photographs by Adam Smith Jr.
Cynthia Baer has also provided overhead slides, and they’re an immeasurable help. She has researched exhaustively to supply photos and sketches of Clemens, ever with the walrus mustache (in his youth he was quite striking), and the times and places he thrived in.
And what a life! Born in 1835 in Florida, Mo., Clemens quickly emigrated with his family to Hannibal, the site of many boyhood pursuits recounted and expanded on in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Baer recalls these in an amiable Southern rasp. (There are no extant recordings of Twain, though actor William Gillette, long a next-door neighbor, recorded his famous imitation of him; Baer doesn’t sound much like it.) The pacing is modest, and Baer’s delivery doesn’t vary a lot. He employs odd grammatical errors, a lot of “were” for “was” (“I weren’t surprised”), perhaps an effort to make Clemens sound homier. He stutters a bit, as perhaps Clemens would have, as he unreels a life rich in its pursuit and conquest of American-dream tropes of the 19th century.
After growing up beside the Mississippi and obsessing about steamboats, Clemens quickly made the rounds from New York to Philadelphia to Washington to St. Louis, quirkily gathering experience and penning letters to his brother, Orion, who was publishing one unsuccessful newspaper after another. Orion printed Samuel’s letters as a series of travelogues, and they gained Samuel a measure of fame: Four or five times in the 100 minutes, Baer’s Twain raises his hands and exults, “Good fortune smiled on me!” Some fascinating facts emerge: Did you know that Clemens backed Stephen Douglas in the 1860 election? That he briefly fought for the Confederacy? That his other longtime next-door neighbor, besides Gillette, was Harriet Beecher Stowe?
“Some fascinating facts emerge: Did you know that Clemens backed Stephen Douglas in the 1860 election?”
It’s a peripatetic career. Drifting to the Sandwich Islands, Clemens keeps writing travelogue pieces; then, returning to the Comstock Lode and failing as a miner, he turns to short stories and makes a splash with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” More successes and some failures follow, as Clemens woos and wins Olivia Langdon, “an excellent judge of character—she turned me down 13 times!” Sadly, Langdon predeceases him, as do two of their three daughters. What we now consider Twain masterpieces aren’t universally hailed: The Prince and the Pauper is only a mild success, and Huckleberry Finn is savaged in the press as “humor of the lowest order” and “flippant, irreverent and trashy”—which, Baer assures us, sends sales flying. He also shares a substantial chunk of Huckleberry Finn, the passage where Huck decides to aid the slave Jim in his escape. “All right, I’ll go to hell,” he concludes, reasoning that his deeds make him a sinner, unaware that they do the opposite.
The program describes Samuel Clemens: Tales of Mark Twain as “contemporary” and promises that it “features his all too relevant today passages and snappers about politics, war, religion and education.” Would that it culled more of them, and upped the present-day commentary: Wouldn’t we love to know what Twain would think about Trump, the border crisis, or the banning of great literature, including his own? But that’s another show, and Samuel Clemens: Tales of Mark Twain emerges as a close companion to Mark Twain Tonight!, the popular one-man entertainment Hal Holbrook performed for decades. As such, it’s pleasant, and Baer is nothing if not personable. Making his entrance down the aisle he remarked to me, “Aren’t you a fine-looking gentleman!” And shaking hands with the audience as they exited, he repeated, “You really are fine-looking.” So of course I’m going to like this.
Joe Baer’s Samuel Clemens: Tales of Mark Twain runs through June 25 at the Actors Temple Theater (339 West 47th St.). Performances are Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m. For tickets, visit telecharge.com.
Playwright: Joe Baer
Direction: Joe Baer
Set: Cynthia Baer
Lighting: Michael Mell
