Hall of Fame

In Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last speech, "I've Been to the Mountaintop," delivered the day before his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, the Civil Rights leader declared: "I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man." But 30-year- old playwright Katori Hall never bought it. "Great people feel fear too," she insists. This is the cornerstone of her insightful new play, The Mountaintop, a re-imagining of King's last night at the Lorraine Motel, opening on Broadway next month. "When you walk into my grandmother's house there are two pictures on the wall: there's Dr. King and there's Jesus," says Hall. "I want people to see that you don't have to be on the wall, you don't have to be elevated to sainthood in order to change the world. So, I think in humanizing him, it really allows people to walk in his shoes." And those shoes smelled a little funky according to the playful Columbia and Harvard-grad. "In the play he has stinky feet. That's human -- sometimes we have stinky feet." The Dr. King of Hall's play is silly, scared, exhausted, lonely -- in other words, one of us.

There is just one other character in The Mountaintop: A motel maid -- named Camae, after Hall's mother -- who comes to King's door and stays for a prophetic chat. Her mother was actually set to attend King's last sermon, but bomb threats kept her at home. "It was kind of a way to put my mother in the same room as Dr. King," Hall says, "because she didn't get the chance to hear him speak."

After The Mountaintop's hit run on the West End, and since becoming the second black playwright to win an Olivier award, (August Wilson was the first -- no big deal), Hall explains that "the cherry on top" was when Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett signed up to star in the Broadway transfer.

Any fears Hall may have about holding her own in a room with two A-list actors, not to mention being one of the youngest playwrights on Broadway, are, like King's, well hidden. "Sometimes people are like 'Oh you're young, and people don't get this opportunity so young," she explains, "and I'm like, "So? Let me speak, let me speak!"

Stylist: Leyla Nuritova
Hair: Takahide Tokuyama for Patrick Melville SalonS

★ THE MOUNTAINTOP IS IN PREVIEWS NOW AND OPENS OCT. 13TH AT THE BERNARD B. JACOBS THEATRE. ★