BWW INTERVIEWS: Katori Hall, Author Of THE MOUNTAINTOP

Welcome back to the UK!

I've been back and forth recently - this is my third time here in two months!

Because you've been so involved in rehearsals and the production of The Mountaintop? How's it going?

It's been going amazing. I went to see it on Saturday, and it was packed. It was such a diverse crowd - kids, a woman with a lot of jewels, black, white, Asian...just a real cross-section of culture.

Did you expect it to attract such a diverse audience?

I wrote it in the stage directions! I said something about the audience being extremely diverse if the theatre get the marketing right.

They obviously are then. When I spoke to David Harewood [who plays Martin Luther King in the play] last week he mentioned the possibility of a Broadway transfer...

We'll see! I don't know yet, I hope it happens. There'll definitely be a US premiere, but it's not been laid out yet.

Do you think it'd be different if you were playing to an American crowd? David and I talked about the possibility that an audience might feel uncomfortable with the subject being treated so irreverently.

I definitely think that it would be challenging, particularly for an African-American audience. There's this black superhero, and to see him off his pedestal could be hard to take. But the play doesn't demonise, denigrate or desecrate him. I think it illuminates him as a human being. And that's the most important thing for me.

How did you come up with the idea of writing about Martin Luther King?

My mother grew up around the corner from the Lorraine Motel. She told me a story about him staying there during the sanitation workers' strike, and giving a speech, but she didn't go because there was a bomb threat. The next day, he was assassinated. And that's been a lifelong regret of hers. That was my jumping-off point.

Watching it, I suddenly felt very conscious that this is all set only 12 years before I was born. You're of a similar age to me - do you feel that the world has changed vastly since then, or do we still face the same problems?

Things are faster, I guess. But some of the issues he is fighting against are still prevalent now - against war, against economic disparity, and generally extending the battle beyond civil rights into economic rights. He was ahead of his time, and people didn't want him to talk about foreign policy, or say white America was going to hell. But we're still battling all this today.

When you're writing, do you consider how an audience might react? David Harewood said that with the comic parts, they have to be played entirely straight or they won't work. Do you worry about the contrasting style jarring?

No, I don't think about that. I want to put it in front of an audience, and I use comedy to get to a deeper truth. I want people to laugh at themselves and each other.

Do you still find your play funny when you watch it?

I'm kind of outside of it now. I like to watch the audience be moved. If someone beside me is crying, when my mother cried on seeing the closing performance at Theatre 503, I feel validated and proud that my play has the ability to make people laugh, cry and think. I want people to go out thinking about the world.

 

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