photo by

Robert Valentine will take on the role of Mark Twain at the Demopolis Public Library's kickoff event for "The Big Read" this Saturday at 1 p.m. He will also put on a one-man show at the Demopolis High School auditorium Saturday at 7 p.m. Admission is free.

The Big Read: Catch your local Twain

By David Snow (Contact) | Demopolis Times

Published Tuesday, February 2, 2010

DEMOPOLIS — The Demopolis Public Library will kick off its inaugural Big Read celebration this Saturday in its own unique style. Since the subject of The Big Read will be “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” it will be Mark Twain himself performing the ceremonial reading of the first page Saturday at 1:30 p.m.

Actually, the part of Mark Twain will be played by Robert Valentine, a senior lecturer in the department of advertising and public relations at Murray State University in Murray, Ky.

He is an author, publisher and playwright, and is known as Kentucky’s foremost interpreter of Mark Twain. He founded “The Circle of Four Rivers,” Kentucky’s only professional storytelling troupe, and is the director of Theatre Arts Enterprises, a company he established in 1982.

“I first did Mark Twain as a student project in 1973,” Valentine said. “I actually had a book by Mark Twain — I really liked a lot of his short stories — and I was handing it around to all my friends. When I finally got to my brother, I handed it to him and said, ‘Hurry up with this. You only have a day to read this because I’m running out of time at the library.’ He kept it and kept it, and the fines were running up at the library, and I got mad at him.

“He said, ‘Look, if you really want all of your friends to see this, script it for the stage, invite them to the theater, and they can all see it at once.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about scripting anything for the stage,’ and he said, ‘Well, I do. I’m a theater major.’ So, he encouraged me to write a one-act play that was, in fact, a stage rendition of this short story that I liked so much. We did it, but the play required somebody to narrate it in the person of Mark Twain, and we couldn’t get anybody that we thought was just the right narrator. Finally, the director, who was my younger brother, said, ‘Look, you do it,’ and I said, ‘I can’t do it; I’m not an actor.’ He said, ‘Ah, you don’t have to be an actor; just pretend to be Mark Twain.’

“So, I did it, and I enjoyed it enormously, and as a result of that performance, people came up to me and said, ‘That was really neat! How about doing that for an English class? How about doing it for a high school?’” he said. “So, that’s how I started doing it. The second performance of the whole thing was actually in a night club on Derby Day in Louisville, Ky. And, I have to say, all those drunk people seemed to really enjoy it!”

Valentine has been asked to perform a number of other historical characters, including Paul Harris, who founded the Rotary Club, and Nathan B. Stubblefield, who is said to have invented radio in Murray, which Valentine performed for KET (Kentucky Educational Television).

Valentine was involved with the Playhouse in the Park community theater — Murray’s version of The Canebrake Players — for several years as an actor and director since its inception in 1977. He has also worked as an actor and director at the Markethouse Theater in Paducah, Ky.

Valentine said some of the highlights of his stage career include having been able to work with several of Shakespeare’s plays.

“Shakespeare is a lot of fun,” he said. “I know that sounds crazy, because people think of Shakespeare as dry and dull and boring, but when you remember that Shakespeare made a fortune at it at a penny a seat, he must have been very good at what he did. When we approach Shakespeare with the idea that it is very exciting stuff — it is really crowd-pleasing, exciting drama — and we don’t have to approach it as if it was holy writ, and it is actually religion instead of theater, I think it gets very exciting and people learn a lot from it.”

Valentine he was very excited to hear about The Big Read from Demopolis Public Library director Morgan Grimes and to be asked to be a part of it.

“I am always pleased when a community decides to take action of this nature to help bring literature to the attention of readers, especially young readers,” he said. “I am very partial to Mark Twain. I think he is the greatest American author, and I think Twain is just a lot of fun! The secret to Twain is the fact that you don’t really appreciate who he is and what he’s doing until you hear him.

“So, to have an opportunity to perform Twain out loud so people can hear the cadence of his voice and the fun in his stories — to me, it’s both an honor and a privilege, and I feel that I’m doing something very important. So, I was very pleased when Morgan called me and said, ‘We want to do this,’ and I said, ‘Man, I can’t think of a more important thing that I could possibly do!’”

Valentine said that there are no existing recordings of Twain. When asked why all impersonations sound so similar — from his own to the famed performance by Hal Holbrook — he said it was newspaper writers who provided the world with clues to Twain’s voice.

“There are a number of newspaper reporters who went to hear Twain speak,” he said. “In those days, a great reporter was nothing less than a terrific storyteller. So, these guys would tell the story of what would happen when they went to hear Twain, and they were very graphic and very complete in what they said. They described his voice. I think it was the Keokuk paper that said, ‘He has a very gravelly voice, as if he has a buzzsaw caught in his throat.’

“We know that, as he got older, his voice was affected by the fact that he was an inveterate cigar smoker, so his lips dried out more quickly than a normal speaker’s would, and he had to stop in the middle of a sentence to wet his lips. The smoking affected his rate of respiration, and he would have to pause in the middle of a sentence to get a deeper breath, and we know that as he got older, as is the case with many older men, the pitch of his voice went up and his voice cracked because he could not support it with the same kind of air that he could when he was younger.

“He spoke with a Missouri accent, and as one newspaper reported, ‘a laconic drawl, as if nothing he said was very important at all,’” he said. “So from the newspapers and what we know of the human voice, we can cobble together an estimate of what Mark Twain must have sounded like.”

The Big Read will kick off this Saturday at the Demopolis Public Library on East Washington Street in Demopolis with a celebration beginning at 1 p.m. The public is invited, and there is no cost.

---

WOULD YOU LIKE TO SHARE THIS STORY?

---