Underground Railway Theater’s mission is to respond poetically to vital questions in the activist and collaborative spirit of our namesake. We chose Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop because of the questions the play asks about what it means to carry forward the visionary work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dr. King is one of our nation’s – indeed the world’s – greatest leaders. But Katori Hall did not write a play about a hero; she wrote a play about a human being, whose choice to dedicate himself to the possibility of justice and equality must have required daily struggle. What could it possibly be like to commit oneself to believing in the best of human nature, while confronting the worst?
The Mountaintop is not a biographical play, and yet it is not a complete fiction. In fact, some of the events in the play that are the most fantastical seem to reflect actual events leading up to April 4th, 1968. Ms. Hall’s play provides us a richly imagined encounter with a deeply human portrait of an American icon, inviting us to see ourselves as potential change agents. The Mountaintop honors Dr. King by asking: What is our responsibility? Who will take up the baton in the ongoing battle for freedom and justice?
Many fine individuals and organizations who have been asking themselves that question have stepped forward to offer feedback to us in the creation of this production, and to lead the “Central Conversations” that surround the play. Topics range from Racial and Economic Justice to Disability Rights, Opportunities in Education, Faith-Based Activism, and efforts being made by our theater community to advance diversity, inclusion, and gender equality. See the schedule on our website, and please join us.
The great playwright August Wilson once said, “I find it criminal that after hundreds of years of slavery in this country, we do not celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation.” Dr. King tried unsuccessfully to press President Kennedy into issuing a Second Emancipation Proclamation to end segregation: “There is but one way to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation.
That is to make its declarations of freedom real; to reach back to the origins of our nation when our message of equality electrified an unfree world, and reaffirm democracy”.
This year is the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and Underground Railway Theater offers this production of The Mountaintop, and the play’s invocation of the possibility of personal and social transformation, as celebration and inspiration, as we lean together into the shaping of our shared future.