Mark Twain married the daughter of one of New York State's leading Abolitionists, Jervis Langdon, who helped Frederick Douglass who became the great Negro leader to escape from slavery.

One of the problems with putting Huck Finn into a movie or on the stage is, you always make the white people stupid and racist. The point is, they don't know they're racist.

[Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.

I never, ever update Mark Twain. I don't modernize it. I let the audience update the material. When I go out on stage, I'm trying to make the audience believe they're looking at this guy who died 104 years ago and listening to him and saying to themselves, "Jesus, he could be talking about today." And that's the point.

We don't have truth delivered to us very often, especially in this very commercialized world.

There was so much to learn and it was all fun. But the best part was getting a laugh from an audience. That was like drowning in candy.

When the audience begins to see the sunrise on that it's hard for them to turn away from it because they're listening to a man talking to them from over a century ago. And nothing has changed. So what are you going to do about that?