“The Mountaintop,” a two-character play written by playwright Katori Hall reimagining the night before Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed, will be performed at the Alliance Theatre from Aug. 30 through Sept. 22.
The story is set in Memphis, at the Lorraine Motel, after an overwhelmed and extremely tired King delivered his infamous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech at a sanitation workers’ strike on Apr. 3, 1968. King meets Camae, a newly hired maid who, in addition to room service, offers harsh truths during a thunderstorm.
Their witty, poignant conversation leads them to expressing their hopes and fears to each other, and confronting their personal realities.
For Hall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, “The Mountaintop” is a way of showing another side of King’s public persona. “In the Black community, we’ve put King on a pedestal. I wanted to honor him by honestly reflecting his humanity. He was extraordinary but he was extremely ordinary,” she said.
Credit: Greg Mooney
Credit: Greg Mooney
“The Mountaintop” is the second of Hall’s plays to be performed at the Alliance Theatre. She made her directorial debut there last year with her Pulitzer Prize-winning play “The Hot Wing King.”
Tinashe Kajese-Bolden, director of “The Mountaintop” and Alliance Theatre’s artistic director, read drafts of the play as Hall created it. She had actors Rob Demery and Jade Payton tour the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change to study archives. She also had them visit Paschal’s Restaurant, where King regularly ate and held meetings, and invited historians, King’s peers and experts to converse with the actors during rehearsals and table reads of the script.
“We had the difficult but necessary task of putting King back on the shelf and telling the story of a man who was exhausted, had traveled the world, talking so much that his voice was hoarse, away from his family and missing home cooking,” Bolden said.
Credit: Kathleen Covington
Credit: Kathleen Covington
Rob Demery, who portrays King, turned down offers from three other theater companies that wanted to do “The Mountaintop.” He said Bolden’s method for creating chemistry with the cast improved his performance.
“She gets out of the way and lets actors do their thing. Everything she says adds to the story. It doesn’t feel like work. It feels like family,” he said.
Credit: Greg Mooney
Credit: Greg Mooney
Hall, a Memphis native who now lives in Atlanta, started writing “The Mountaintop” in 2007 as an ode to her mother never making it to see King’s “Mountaintop” speech. She created Camae to represent Black women who were instrumental to advancing the Civil Rights Movement.
“I wanted to put my mom in the room with King. It’s a way for me to say thank you to those women who helped to change this country for the better,” Hall said.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Spending two years to develop the script, Hall read and listened to all of King’s speeches to capture his tone, cadence and rhythm. She spoke with peers like Ambassador Andrew Young and said she paid attention to how working-class Black people spoke in the 1960s, to bring realism to the one-act production.
“I want to be honest, true and reflect all of us in as authentic a light as I possibly can,” Hall said.
“She has access to vernacular that feels very familiar yet so poetic,” said Bolden said of Hall’s attention to detail in her script. Jade Payton, who portrays Camae, said the play’s dialect allows her to relate to her character.
“The way her voice was written made it so easy to find humanity. It’s part of the amazing artistic environment that allows the play to be incredible,” Payton said.
Credit: Greg Mooney
Credit: Greg Mooney
“The Mountaintop” premiered in London in 2009. The following year, Hall became the first Black woman to win an Olivier Award, a top prize for professional theater in the U.K.
In 2011, “The Mountaintop” premiered on Broadway, starring Academy Award-nominated actors Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett. It was first produced in Atlanta by Tony-Award-winner Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company in November 2012, under the direction of actress Jasmine Guy.
Due to her hectic production schedule delivering the third season of “P-Valley,” the hit strip-club-themed TV drama Hall created and continues to lead as showrunner and executive producer, she could not be heavily involved with the new production. Still, she compared theatrical versions of “The Mountaintop” and all of her plays as watching “a kid going off to college.”
“The work has to go forth and be in the world. I’m looking forward to finally sitting back in the audience, letting it walk on its own and be independent of my creative process,” she said.
7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 6. Alliance Theatre. 1280 Peachtree Street NE, Atlanta. 404-733-4600. AllianceTheatre.org
Sign up for the UATL newsletter.
Read more stories like this by liking UATL on Facebook and following @itsUATL on X and Instagram.
About the Author
