American playwright Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop,” a fictional depiction of the last hours of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life, has not yet made it to New York, but it was given a reading in Moscow on Friday.
A packed house at the Open Stage Project listened intently as Satirikon Theater actors Grigory Siyatvinda and Yelizaveta Martinez Cardenas read the parts of King and a mysterious female figure named Camae. She appears first as a hotel maid and finally as an angel sent from God.
The reading was organized by the New Play Festival, currently underway as an adjunct of the Golden Mask Festival, in collaboration with the Lark Play Development Center in New York. The Lark has developed Hall’s work in the past and, according to the organization’s producing director John Eisner, it has the goal of bringing international recognition to other writers it works with.
John Eisner, Katori Hall and Tatyana Khaikina listen to comments from spectators after a reading of Hall's "The Mountaintop" in Moscow on Friday.
