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"  In Katori Hall&amp;#039;s  The Mountaintop\u2014which won London&amp;#039;s Olivier Award for Best Play last year and opens on Broadway this month in a production starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett\u2014Martin Luther King Jr. enters room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 3, 1968, unaware that he&amp;#039;ll be assassinated on its balcony the next day. But Camae, the maid who delivers his coffee and much else, does seem to know\u2014as did the black community at the time. Hall&amp;#039;s own mother, then a teenager, was forbidden to attend King&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve Been to the Mountaintop&amp;quot; speech that night for fear of violence. Now, Hall gives her mother the opportunity she missed 43 years ago\u2014and something too many of us may have also missed. You were born in Memphis in 1981. Was King a saintly presence there? My grandmother&amp;#039;s house had two pictures on the wall: Jesus and Martin. The Lorraine was almost like a cross at Calvary. And you felt his presence everywhere. I had lots of relationships with white people growing up, but if I said, &amp;quot;I want to visit Kelly,&amp;quot; that was hard for my father because he had never stepped into a white person&amp;#039;s house before. I credit Dr. King with making that change possible. Was there an awareness of King&amp;#039;s more human attributes? People were extremely aware of his flaws, and, like Camae says, &amp;quot;Negro talk strike faster than lightnin&amp;#039;.&amp;quot; However, black people were very protective of him. My dad says, &amp;quot;You ain&amp;#039;t got to write down everything.&amp;quot; Wait until he sees the show! Yes: the cursing, the wandering eye, the sound of him urinating offstage. But somehow these don&amp;#039;t diminish him. Did you hesitate about such details? Oh my God, he peed! But no, I absolutely didn&amp;#039;t hesitate because while writing it I figured that, like my other 15 plays, it&amp;#039;ll never be produced. It made me fearless. Later, there was some blowback. I had to part from a director who felt I was denigrating King. A famous music producer who read it said, &amp;quot;She can&amp;#039;t do that, have King walking around with holes in his socks!&amp;quot; But I needed to present him as someone who would make you look in the mirror and say: We could be King too. It&amp;#039;s surprising that such an American story would premiere in London. It was very scary. Would this audience have the resonance with the material? But they absolutely did. Opening night, the audience was so diverse, it was a church of King&amp;#039;s dreams. And they didn&amp;#039;t have the knee-jerk reaction they might have here. There, kings are meant to be deconstructed. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/interviews/a11794/recasting-dr-martin-luther-king-609115/?src=global_footer>