A Mark Twain enthusiast tackles an age-old story

The ghost of Mark Twain has haunted Alan Kitty for nearly his entire life.

Like many a child, he read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and dreamed of running away from home and living the way did Tom did. Only the river that Kitty planned to navigate by raft wasn’t the Mississippi in Missouri, it was the Susquehanna in central Pennsylvania.

He even packed up some of his belongings in a knapsack, but like most young boys on the Twain Trail, he was back home by dinner.

Unlike many young rascals, Kitty didn’t outgrow his fascination with Twain and his colorful cast of characters. Instead, the actor/playwright has made a career impersonating the author of such classics as “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

Since 1979, Kitty has portrayed Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, more than 1,000 times, both on stage and film and at corporate events all over the country.

In an eerie coincidence, Kitty has also lived around the corner from where Twain once resided. “I lived in New York for more than 12 years and I found out after the fact that every neighborhood I moved into, Mark Twain also happened to have lived there,” he says.

After pausing for dramatic effect (Kitty is nothing but dramatic, even in real life), he adds, “which freaked me out not a little bit.”

One day not long after Kitty moved to New York City around the corner from Washington Square, he noticed a plaque at 21 Fifth Ave. stating that Samuel Clemens lived there from 1904-08. “This discovery was incredible to me because I had just started performing as Twain,” Kitty says.

That wasn’t the first time that Kitty found himself walking in the footsteps of Twain. When Kitty was starting out professionally, he went into the printing business, which was — you guessed it — Twain’s first line of work.

Scientists actually have a name for Kitty’s Twain experience. It’s called “frequency illusion,” where something you recently learned about or has become important to you seems to be around every corner.

Kitty’s not likely to find one of Twain’s former residences in Sarasota. But he’s still mining the works of the All-American raconteur for his creative endeavors. Most recently, Kitty starred in “Mark Twain: They Told Me to Be Brief,” at The Sarasota Players in February 2023.

Helping to encourage his creativity since he arrived in Sarasota 11 years ago has been a group called the Sarasota Area Playwrights Society. SAPS, as it is known for short, was founded in 2007 by George Loukides and has since grown from a small group of actors and playwrights to more than 70 members.

Kitty’s latest effort, a play called “Original Sin,” was based on Twain’s works, “The Diaries of Adam & Eve,” a series of monologues he wrote between 1904-06. The work was Twain’s tribute to his wife, Olivia, who died in 1904.

“Original Sin” follows Adam and Eve as they discover life and each other. Kitty plays Adam and Jill Schroeder stars as Eve in a production being produced by the Mark Twain Society and directed by Alan Brasington.

Following a recent rehearsal of “Original Sin” in the playwright’s Sarasota home, Kitty and his team sat down for a conversation about their upcoming production. It will run at Katherine Michelle Tanner’s Tree Fort Productions in The Crossings at Siesta Key mall from Sept. 6-8 and Sept. 13-15.

Asked why older actors were playing Adam and Eve, who were newly created by God and presumably should be in the bloom of youth, Kitty replies, “In the Bible, it says Adam lived to be 900 years old.”

Then Kitty, who is in his seventies, has a little time left before he hits the age mark for Adam.

In the tradition of “great minds think alike,” it turns out another adaptation of Twain’s “The Diaries of Adam & Eve” was simultaneously developed on the West Coast. It was written by Ed Weinberger, a TV sitcom writer best known for hit shows like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Taxi.”

The “Journals of Adam and Eve” played at The Barry Marshall Theatre in Burbank in January. In Weinberger’s version of the Garden of Eden tale, Adam is 93 years old and was played by Hal Linden.

Eve, whose age isn’t disclosed, was portrayed by Sally Struthers. (Maybe Eve was the first woman who declined to reveal her age.)

In Kitty’s production, the playwright and lead actor explains that there is a quality of timelessness that makes the age of the performers irrelevant.

There is also a fair amount of bickering about gender differences sure to spark recognition and laughter from the audience. The more things change...

The fact that Kitty’s mythical Garden of Eden will be on stage in a part of Florida that some residents consider paradise should ramp up the believability quotient. But will there be palm leaves instead of fig leaves? Kitty’s keeping mum about the costumes, although he volunteered that he has grown a beard for his role as Adam.

The staging of “Original Sin” in Sarasota follows a reading in New York for a producer that Schroeder helped locate who was interested in the material. “Things didn’t turn out as planned, but that’s OK,” Kitty says.

It only took him about a week to locate funding for his production in Sarasota, which Kitty says is testament to local support for the arts. “It’s a wonderful, loving arts community,” he says.