“I wanted to depict not only Dr. King’s triumphs but also his struggles. He achieves such great things, but he is grounded in a very human existence. My hope is the audience will be inspired by his greatness, but that they’ll also realize that he is for regular people. I want the audience to come out saying, ‘I can be a King, too. We all can be Kings.’”

“I’ve gotten more fearless in terms of how I write and what I write about. To many people, [The Mountaintop] is almost blasphemous: How dare you take King off a pedestal? I say, How dare I not? I’m a dramatist. I’m supposed to put human beings on stage. People are people. People bleed. People die. People are afraid. My purpose is to tell stories that wouldn’t necessarily be told.”

—Julliard Magazine, September 2011. 

“When my mother was 15 years old, Dr. King came to speak at Mason Temple in Memphis, and she wanted to go and see him. She lived around the corner of the Lorraine Motel and had seen King speak before. But this time, Big Momma told her no because she had heard through the grapevine that someone was going to bomb the church.”

“Even a friend of hers had overheard the mayor say that if Dr. King came back to town, he wasn’t going to leave alive. And so this play comes out of my mother’s missed opportunity, and Camae is partially based on my mother as well.”

 

—The Root, November 11, 2011.