While he was out starring in the national tour of “To Kill a Mockingbird” in 2023-24, Richard Thomas took to reading Mark Twain’s iconic novels “Tom Sawyer and “Huckleberry Finn” to help flesh out his performance as Atticus Finch.

Little did Thomas — now starring in a touring revival of Hal Holbrook’s one-man show “Mark Twain Tonight!” — know how unexpectedly prescient those choices would be.

“I revisited both (books),” Thomas explains via phone from his home in New York, “because I felt it would offer a wonderful grounding in the way of life at the time and also in terms of the racial issues and social issues that were still being dealt with in ‘Mockingbird’s’ time. I found reading those books as I was doing ‘Mockingbird’ to be enormously enriching to me.

“Towards the end of the (‘Mock

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