- On this edition of "Arteffects", the life of Mark Twain through the eyes of McAvoy Layne.

(old-timey piano music) - If people walk away from one of my programs and the next day go to the library and check out a book by Mark Twain, I've had a good day.

(old-timey piano music) - [Beth] The fascinating history of Piper's Opera House in Virginia City.

- [Patty] In a small community, this is where people can get together and exchange ideas and celebrate or have fun.

- [Beth] Local students bring history to life through "Young Chautauqua".

- Finding somebody interesting who lived on this earth and being able to become them in a way is a very interesting experience - [Beth] Plus tradition, style and technique upon your head.

- What I'm looking for is to see some satisfaction, some happiness, some excitement in the person's eyes, and that's my reward.

- It's all ahead on this edition of "Arteffects".

(jazzy upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Meg and Dillard Myers, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

- Hello, I'm Beth MacMillan and welcome to "Arteffects".

In our featured segment, we head to Incline Village to meet McAvoy Layne who impersonated Mark Twain throughout northern Nevada for more than 35 years.

Before he retired in September of 2023, Layne performed for thousands of schools and special events, dressing the part perfectly and speaking the celebrated words of Mark Twain in true Nevada style.

(old timey piano music) - Becoming Mark Twain is fun for me.

You know, you just mess up your hair and slip into a white suit that's kind of rumpled.

Pick up a pipe.

I can't talk without it after all these years.

My name is McAvoy Layne but I'm more recognized as Mark Twain.

Mark Twain was the father of America's literature.

He left us about 28 volumes but the ones you might remember most from your childhood were the boy books, "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn", and maybe as you got a little older, "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court".

My favorite is "Roughing It" because there's a lot in there about Nevada.

I arrived riding a small yellow donkey so small my feet touched the ground on both sides and he was able to bend around and bite me on the legs.

(audience laughing) Before Mark Twain tapped me on the shoulder, I was in radio and in a perfect place, the Hawaiian Islands.

(upbeat music) I was off the air at 10 o'clock and on a wave at 10 after.

I had everything a boy could want except skiing.

So I rented a cabin here at Tahoe for five days.

(bright music) I was so excited I could hardly sleep the first night but it snowed five feet overnight.

It took them five days to plow up to where I was.

I thought it was the worst stroke of luck but it turned out to be the best.

I threw darts for two days, then my elbow gave out and I sat down and on the coffee table was, "The Complete Essays of Mark Twain".

And I had cabin fever by then.

My brain was soft, so that seed was planted in fertile ground.

(folk music) It took me 10 years to read everything he gave us before I had the courage to go out and have a white suit made and started visiting classrooms in our schools.

I would see 10 schools a week and I'd go see secondary schools Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then on Thursday I'd go see a couple elementary schools and then Friday, I'd always schedule a middle school to keep from getting soft and I'd come home on a gurney.

(folk music) When I first started portraying Mark Twain I was 45 years old, so I wanted to sound older.

I wanted to sound 70 so I would affect my voice.

"Well, now, old Jim Blaine would get comfortably and sociably charged and tell the story of his grandfather's old ram."

Now I'm older than Twain would be.

I'll be 80 this summer so I'm older than he was when he died.

Now I'm trying to sound younger.

But you still throw in that little Missouri accent.

I must confess to you, I have no formal education.

In truth, I am as unlettered as the backside of a tombstone, but I've gained worlds of knowledge and secondhand, none of it, correct (crowd chuckling) No, all you need for success in this life is ignorance and confidence.

And then success is sure.

My very favorite part about being Mark Twain is the way people react to being near him and asking questions or perhaps sharing a story of their own.

It always brings out the best in people.

- [Everyone] Mark Twain days!

(upbeat music) - Piper's Opera House rests up there on B Street in Virginia City, and it is the shrine for me.

The luckiest break I ever got was when I was first starting out, I got a call from Carol Piper Marshall, the great-granddaughter of John Piper.

She said, "McAvoy, I hear you're portraying Mark Twain in the schools."

I said, "Yes, I'm loving it.

I'm seeing 10 schools a week."

She said, "How'd you like to do two shows a day, six days a week for four months at Piper's?"

Over 200 shows.

And I got to try out new material on a live audience every day because some of Twain's writing is wonderful literature but does not recite, and you find out what works with a live audience.

So by the end of that summer of '88, 35 years ago, thanks to Carol Piper Marshall, I wasn't ready for prime time but I was ready to go out on the road.

On the 30th of September this year, I'll be standing on that stage in my last program as Mark Twain.

(folk music) When I laid down my pen at the territorial enterprise I had four horse whippings and two duals owing to me.

And yet, when I said goodbye to Virginia City, Carson City, Lake Tahoe, I knew I was saying goodbye to the most vigorous enjoyment of life I would ever be afforded.

Those days were full to the brim with a wine of life and there have been no others like that.

(audience applauding) Mark Twain liked to look at the good side of human nature.

Toward the end, after his wife Olivia died he got a little bit sour and went off in the dark side of Mark Twain.

But before Livy left this earthly realm, she taught him to use his humor like the wheel on an opera glass, to focus our attentions on more serious matters at hand so he could comment on our society and human nature with his humor in such a way that it would stick with us, like, "Always do right.

This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."

That's wonderful wisdom.

When I first started out being Mark Twain, I made myself a promise.

One, have fun.

Two, don't play loosely with his material and make Twain scholars happy.

And I've stuck to that all 35 years and I'm proud of that.

(folk music) - Piper's Opera House, which hosted McAvoy Layne's final performance as Mark Twain is truly a centerpiece for arts and culture in Virginia City.

Since it opened in 1863, Piper's Opera House has experienced two fires, restoration, financial hardship, and 160 years of music, plays, lectures, and other community events that continue to evolve to this day.

- When there's a production at Piper's, the whole town lights up.

The B and B's are filled, the hotels are filled, the restaurants, saloons, the gift stores.

- I think it's important for a community to have a gathering place and you know, the big cities, I mean, this is not a big deal, but in a small community, this is where people can get together and exchange ideas and celebrate or have fun.

- [Andria] Storey County school district purchased Piper's Opera House, and we use it as an adjunct classroom.

We teach history here with drama, set design, obviously music, we use it for graduations and community events.

It's just a wonderful thing.

- Fundamentally, the music of a people, the visual art of a people, dance, theater, specifically opera in this case, they always tell a story about where people are in a specific time and place and whether those themes be universal, whether those themes be specifically historical, I think the arts are crucial in telling the story the ongoing unfoldment of humanity.

- [Patty] People don't realize that there were actually three buildings.

One was the original one built in 1863 and that was built by a man named Tom McGuire and John Piper acquired that in 1867.

- Everything went along merrily until a couple miners got into a tough down on a street in October of 1875 and then knocked over a lantern.

Three-fourths of the town burned in less than six hours - So that one burned down and John decided to rebuild up on B Street.

- That was his most beautiful opera house and then it burned in 1883, we think, because John Piper who loved to smoke cigars, might've caught it on fire.

The town was devastated, and so they got together and they rebuilt the opera house for him.

(old timey piano music) We are also continuing to do opera.

- When I was approached by the people at Piper's to help them refurbish the Opera House, I said what better way than is to take this new work, do a small preview of it in the actual space and generate support for its refurbishment.

(old-timey piano music) What's wonderful about the space is acoustically, it's really quite fantastic.

It's an old space.

It's all natural surfaces.

The sound is not sucked up by carpet and by anything that sort of dampens sound.

(old-timey piano music) - The role of the Opera House all over the West was really a community center.

It's sort of a misnomer that opera was performed there.

There wasn't a lot of opera.

There were more community centers, multipurpose areas where you not only had entertainment but you had political meetings, you had dances.

This opera house he constructed specifically to use in multiple ways.

The entertainment was very varied.

Big in those days were a lot of Shakespeare.

There were a lot of minstrel shows.

That was big in that era.

What they called burlesque and very risky performances would be a woman performing in flesh colored tights.

I mean, that would be the height of the burlesque.

They had animal fights.

That, of course, was a form of entertainment.

There were lecturers that traveled around the country who giving lectures whether it was a suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton or some of the other prominent speakers.

As much as it's evolved, the Piper's Opera House, it's still is doing exactly what John Piper intended it to do.

It's still the community gathering center and it's certainly a prominent part of the Virginia City community.

- I think for the art community, I think what is crucial is that we make decisions about what we value in our communities.

We make decisions about buildings that we value.

We make decisions about institutions that we value.

And so if the state of Nevada, if the county, if this region is ever going to preserve its history I think there have to be certain landmarks that are stalwart in the preservation of that history.

And I think Piper's is one of them.

- To learn more, visit pipersoperahouse.com.

Now it's time for this week's art quiz.

Which artist created the portrait of Mark Twain with a steamboat and the Mississippi River in the background for the Mark Twain Forever Postage Stamp issued in 2011?

Is the answer A, Antonio Alcala, B, Tracy Emin, C, Howard Koslow, or D, Gregory Manchess?

And the answer is D, Gregory Manchess.

Great Basin Young Chautauqua brings the past to life.

Through the nationally recognized program produced by Nevada humanities, local students have the opportunity to not only learn about historical figures, but also portray them in front of a live audience.

Through character-based monologues and Q and A sessions, they provide historical insight by lifting history off the page.

(upbeat music) (audience applauding) - Now that I'm president, let me tell you a little about how I got here.

In my childhood, nobody would've thought that I would become president.

- Young Chautauqua comes from the Chautauqua experience where one takes a historical character and researches that figure and performs in character, in costume, reenacting the life and experiences of that historical character.

(audience applauding) - Hello, I'm Johnny Cash.

♪ I hear the train a comin' ♪ ♪ It's rollin' 'round the bend ♪ - The wonderful thing about this program is that any kid can be a Young Chautauqua scholar.

They just have to have the will and the desire to do it, and it's available to everyone.

- I was traveling in Africa in early 1912.

Madam will be in a very grave accident.

I love acting and I love studying history and I heard about Chautauqua through a friend and once we learned more about it I knew that it was something I wanted to try.

And I have been doing it for three years now and it is a very, very fun experience.

- [Stephanie] They are performing at venues around the region, including the Washoe County Library system, at various library locations and the scholars also perform at their schools and in their community groups and church groups to really hone their craft.

One of the things that our scholars enjoy the most is sort of finding the right costume, the period appropriate outfits, the eyeglasses, maybe a little bit of talcum powder in the hair if they're portraying an older character and they might work on a certain accent or a certain pose or a comportment to really embody the character they're portraying.

- I've just returned from my very first space mission.

I am indeed the first American woman into space.

- This year I researched Edith Rosenbaum.

She survived the sinking of the RMS Titanic and she was also a fashion designer and she had a very, very interesting life.

- [Christina] One of the great things about Chautauqua that happens for the kids is that they do all this research and then they also get to speak as a scholar at the end of their performance.

So they give this monologue in character then they break character, and the audience has an opportunity to both ask the character questions and then ask the scholar questions about their own research.

And the program is really transformative for kids.

We have kids come into our program that are incredibly shy.

So an important part of the program is to learn how to speak publicly and to deliver a monologue performance.

And so the kids have to actually conquer their fears, get on stage and present their character to the public and it's a really transformative experience for them.

So it has this kind of twin purpose, the research, cultivating a love of history and a sense of empathy for people who have lived before them and who have done important things in our world.

- Just finding somebody interesting who lived on this earth and being able to become them in a way is a very interesting experience.

- I learned that his life wasn't perfect at all and there were a lot of misfortunes and a lot of hardships that he went through that kind of made him who he was.

And that kind of reflected on me to make me think about what I want to do and what choices I'm gonna make.

- [Clara] Researching with kids who share your same interests is definitely a big thing that makes Young Chautauqua a fun experience.

- [Christina] It's a learning opportunity for everybody, not only the kids who go through the program, but also the audience members who get to see the performances that the children do, and it's also fun.

- To learn more, visit nevadahumanities.org.

From boots and spurs to cowboy hats, Virginia City is the place to step back in time with style.

The craft of traditional hat making is alive and well as you're about to see.

Using time-tested tools, techniques and the eye for the perfect fit, hat maker Pascal Baboulin creates hats of all shapes and sizes.

(folk music) - I'm a hat maker.

I make my hats here in Virginia City.

I am from France, originally from the French Alps, not very far from the Swiss border and I came to the United States in 1998 as a student.

I've always been a big fan of history and I came to do my master's degree in history, came to study the French immigration during the Gold Rush.

I met my wife who was from Virginia City and she took me up here.

By looking around, you feel like you are diving in history.

Being in Virginia City and being also a big history buff, I thought it would be nice to bring to the town a craft, something more historical, perhaps more so traditional.

I did an intern to a hat maker in Arizona.

I only had the basics when I was working back in France but it's mostly here in the United States that I learned the main techniques.

We're gonna start by taking his head measurement, followed by also his head shape as the hat has to be comfortable and a perfect fit from the beginning.

We are using some very old tools and I think my oldest tool is from the 1890s.

It's actually an old tool that comes from Paris and it's called a confirmatur.

It's this little crazy machine that I put on the person's head and that's gonna give me the shape of the customer's head.

What we are looking for is a perfect balance or perfect symmetry between hat and face.

I deal with all hat stretchers.

We deal with hat blocks.

We deal with an old brim sizers.

When I think about it, and I think about all the people that have been touching or using those tools before me, you can get slightly emotional or, you know, it feels like we are keeping alive and old trade and we can be proud of that.

(old timey piano music) We're using this very old classic American felt which is made of beaver.

It's usually a blend of beaver and rabbit fur.

The beaver has always been used in the hat industry and that's going back to the trappers a long time ago when people were doing their conquest of the West.

Actually, many of the trappers were from Europe and most of them were from France.

They realized that the characteristic of a beaver felt were perfect for a hat, as it does make the hat durable and sturdy, but also waterproof and this in a natural way.

I start with a blank, which has a pretty ugly form.

It's a pretty basic shape.

The first time is gonna be the steaming.

From there, it's gonna be blocked.

From there, we're gonna be pressed, sanded, going to get a very beautiful texture, and it's after that that we can re-steam the hat after we trim the brim and we're gonna start to sculpt.

We're gonna sculpt the crown.

The sculpting, it's my personal touch, you know?

I don't use any blocks that are pre-made, pre-shaped.

So it's really, it's my creation for the person.

This is why perhaps I get the shininess in my eyes because, you know, I like to think that there's an artistic side to it.

- This is the first custom made hat I've ever had.

There's no doubt in my mind that there's artistry involved.

A lot of these skills are going away and it's a nice feeling having something quality made by a craftsman.

- To see some satisfaction, some happiness, some excitement in the person's eyes, that's my reward, that's what I'm looking for.

Mixing the hat making and my passion for history is obviously the cherry on the cake.

What I feel like I'm doing right now is like living history.

Voila.

So Virginia City is, it's a perfect place for me to be and I completely feel like I fit here.

(old timey big band music) - To learn more about Pascal Baboulin, check out visitvirginiacitynv.com.

And that wraps it up for this edition of "Arteffects".

If you want to watch new "Arteffects" segments early, make sure you subscribe to the PBS Reno YouTube channel and don't forget to keep visiting pbsreno.org to watch complete episodes of "Arteffects".

Until next week, I'm Beth MacMillan.

Thanks for watching.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Arteffects" is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Meg and Dillard Myers, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(upbeat music)