About the Play:

The Mountaintop has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Male Monologues.

The Mountaintop is a full-length drama by Katori Hall. A gripping historical-fantastical two-hander portraying events the night before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in Memphis, following the delivery of his memorable "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech. The Mountaintop offers a beautiful and powerful meditation on mortality, destiny, and the liminal space where the material meets the divine.

The Mountaintop takes place on the night of April 3, 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has stood high upon the mountaintop and he's seen the Promised Land. But on this rainy night in April 3, 1968, the civil rights leader mostly feels footsore, weary and sick at heart. After delivering one of his most impassioned and famous speeches to support sanitation workers during an intense strike in Memphis, an exhausted Dr. King retires to room 306 in the now-famous Lorraine Motel. He calls down for room service while a storm rages outside. When a mysterious young hotel maid named Camae arrives with coffee – and an unexpected message – Dr. King is forced to confront his destiny and his legacy as a leading figure in the American Civil Rights Movement. Katori Hall's inspired and inspiring play was a sell-out on West End and Broadway stages. It tracks not only one long night in American history but, in an astonishing finale, hurtles us through forty-five years of civil rights into the twenty-first century.

The Mountaintop was first produced in 2009 to great acclaim at Theatre 503 in London, and transferred to the Trafalgar Studios in the West End of London, winning the 2010 Olivier Award for Best New Play – the ultimate standard in British playwriting. It opened in 2011 at Broadway's Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in New York City, starring Angela Bassett and Samuel L. Jackson and received a 38-city tour in 2018 to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King Jr. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 1 female, 1 male

What people say:

"Inventive and startlingly moving." — The Times (London)

"Sometimes a play comes out of the blue and knocks everyone for six ... A beautiful and startling piece, beginning naturalistically before shifting gear into something magical, spiritual and touching ... A play that keeps you marveling to the end." — The Telegraph (London)

"Wondrous, hilarious and heartbreaking." — The Independent (London)

"Even before the first flash of lightning – and there will be plenty of that before evening's end – an ominous electricity crackles through the opening moments of The Mountaintop." — New York Times

"[The Mountaintop] crackles with theatricality and a humanity more moving than sainthood." — New York Newsday

"…as audacious as it is inventive ... [a] thrilling, wild, provocative flight of magical realism…Hall keeps her audience guessing ... This is playwrighting without a net, a defiant poke in the eye of all historical conventions and political correctness ... The King that is left after Hall's humanization project is somehow more real and urgent and whole." — Associated Press

About the Playwright:

Katori Hall is a Pulitzer Prize and Olivier Award-winning African-American playwright and television creator/producer from Memphis, Tennessee. A graduate of the Juilliard School's Lila Acheson Wallace playwriting program, her plays explore the lives of black and often invisible Americans with vivid language, dynamic narratives and richly textured characterization. She is an alumna of the Lark Playwrights' Workshop, where she developed The Mountaintop, and a graduate of Columbia University, the A.R.T. at Harvard University, and the Juilliard School. She is currently the showrunner and Executive Producer of the Starz drama series P-Valley.