‘Mountaintop” playright bears witness with a voice all her own

Katori Hall gives the

Creative Writing Series Reading. 6:30 p.m. Nov. 14. Free. Emory University, Woodruff Library, Jones Room, 54o Asbury Circle, Atlanta. 404-712-4624, www.emory.edu

The residents of housing project slated for demolition in modern day Memphis. Kids in a Rwandan village bragging about the number of people their father killed during that country’s genocide in 1994. The last night on earth for Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel.

It is through those people and in those disparate locations that playwright and Memphis native Katori Hall explores the ideas of citizenship, agency and power. Next week, True Colors Theatre, premieres its production of Hall’s Broadway show “The Mountaintop,” an imagining of King’s last hours alive. The play was awarded the 2010 Olivier Award for Best New Play and had a strong run on Broadway with Samuel L. Jackson staring as King and Angela Bassett as the hotel maid, Camae, directed by Kenny Leon. Hall, a graduate of Harvard and Juilliard, will be in Atlanta on Wednesday to attend a performance of “The Mountaintop.” She will also be speaking at Emory University about how she came to find her creative voice and stake a claim in a genre where voices like hers are underrepresented on the American main stage. Here, the 32-year-old talks, about politics and theater as a form of witness.

Q: You grew up in Memphis, which certainly isn’t known as a theater town. So how did it click for you that a career in theater was your calling?

A: I have about 50 journals that I just took out of storage. I started reading them and realized that since I was 6 years old, I was saying, "I want to be an actress." Where I got this notion from, who knows? Probably watching HBO. I was always playing games and pretend by myself because it would lift me into different spaces. But I did not have access to a lot of theater. There was one local theater in the city and I went to a few of the productions, even ushered a couple of times, but it just seemed so far away from me. It really wasn't until college that it clicked for me that it could possibly be something that I could be professional at.

Q: You initially aspired to be a journalist.

A: Every internship that I applied for indicated as such. I applied for an internship at the Boston Globe, I got it. I worked for Newsweek when I was living in South Africa for a study abroad program. But it was when I was in South Africa that my writing started taking a more creative route, because while I was there I delved into performance poetry and spoken word. That was the first time I felt confident in this creative space. I was really inspired by a country that was really not that far away from apartheid. And I was inspired by how poetry and story telling could intertwine with politics and social change. That was a transformational moment for me and serves as an inspiration for my work to this day.

Q: In your plays politics and war always have a presence, whether it’s World War II, the Iraq War, the genocide of Rwanda or even the American Civil Rights movement. So would you consider yourself a political playwright?

A: My family was always talking about politics at the dinner table. My dad read the paper twice a day, watched the news twice a day. I came up in a very informed family. They participated in marches, I would go phone-banking during campaigns, at 10 years old I was putting up signs during political campaigns. I learned at a very young age that we are all very linked by this matrix that politics creates.

Q: People have gotten hung up on your depiction of Martin Luther King Jr., foibles and all, in “Mountaintop.” But the play seems rooted in a political philosophy that’s as layered as your portrayal of an icon.

A: I wanted to look at this idea of, how far have we come? But in the world of theater, it's very hard to construct an idea and make it emotionally effective on stage. You have to do it through a person. So this past that I set up for him, to make him very human with charm and desires and deep-seated regrets, was just a way for me to take him off a pedestal, take him off the cross and put him in the room with us. Because I feel that if we can walk in the room with him, then we can see that we are human beings just like he is, and if he can do these extraordinary things, then we can as well.

Q: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage is a good friend of yours and her play “Ruined” explores the horror experienced by women during the war in Congo. Your new play, “Children of Killers,” just closed in New York and is about the legacy of the 1994 Rwandan genocide through the eyes of children. How did Nottage’s take on the aftermath of war influence yours?

A: She hooked me up with a group of artists who were going over to Rwanda in 2009. When I first got there, I didn't know what I was getting at. The idea of the play didn't come about until I actually ended up meeting a perpetrator (of the genocide) at a meeting of both perpetrators and survivors. In this village they get together weekly and go through a group therapy session together, though not how Westerners think of therapy. It was very practical. It was, "How are we as a community going to live with each other? You killed my family, but we live next door to each other. How are we going to live with each other?" I knew he was a murderer, but he was being a likable person. And that was when I started thinking, "Well what does his son think of him? What does his daughter think of him? How do they encapsulate him in history but also in present time, because he can be monster and man." That's where the genesis came from. Plays are stories of witness.