Theatre Career

'The Mountaintop,' with Samuel L. Jackson as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., takes place the day before Dr. King was assassinated in the motel where he spent his last night.

'The Mountaintop' stars Samuel L. Jackson as civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Angela Bassett as Camae, a Lorraine Motel chambermaid who pays Dr. King a visit the evening before he is assassinated. Tony Award nominee Kenny Leon ('Fences,' 'Stick Fly') directs Katori Hall's Olivier Award-winning play, a fact-inspired work of fiction intent on showing the human side of the iconic activist.

'The Mountaintop,' the new play by Katori Hall starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett, opened this week at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in New York following an acclaimed run in London. Expectations for the drama -- a speculative work about the last day in the life of Martin Luther King Jr. -- are high. The celebrity casting has added a media-frenzy element to the equation.

Stage performances from 1980-2011

'I generally start with an idea, something that I want to say. In The Piano Lesson the idea was, 'Can one acquire a sense of self-worth by denying one's past?' Next I got the title from a Romare Bearden painting called The Piano Lesson; so said August Wilson in a 1987 interview with theatre scholar and historian, David Savran when asked, 'How do you start a play?'

The Piano Lesson is a 1990 play by American playwright August Wilson. It is the fourth play in Wilson's The Pittsburgh Cycle. Wilson began writing this play by playing with the various answers regarding the possibility of "acquir a sense of self-worth by denying one's past". The Piano Lesson received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

One of cinema's most charismatic actors with an affinity for foul-mouthed characters, Samuel L. Jackson made his Broadway debut in 1990 as an understudy in The Piano Lesson.

LEAD: With ''Burner's Frolic,'' the fourth in Charles Fuller's continuing cycle of plays about black Americans in the second half of the 19th century, one has a clearer picture of the playwright's ambitious intention. Through a series of episodes, seemingly tangential in the sweep of American history, the playwright is scrutinizing the economic entrapment of people forced to weigh their pragmatic needs against their desire for complete emancipation and integration.

Samuel L. Jackson....Jim Paine

JOSEPH A. WALKER has not been much heard from since his corrosive family drama, ''The River Niger,'' won the Tony Award for best play a decade ago. ''District Line,'' Mr. Walker's new work for the Negro Ensemble Company, may reflect the frustrations of that long silence. A potpourri of clashing theatrical styles, far- ranging political aper,cus and truncated emotional catharses, ''District Line'' seems a jam-packed anthology of a talented writer's false starts and half-developed projects. Even in Douglas Turner Ward's sleek, sensitive staging at the Theater Four, the evening is a mess - albeit a peppery, well-acted mess. The play apotheosizes a day in the life of taxicab drivers who wait for fares at the district line, the boundary between Washington and its Maryland suburbs. At his liveliest, Mr. Walker creates funny, pointed encounters between the hackers and their passengers. In one bit, a proud black domestic, portrayed with gusto by Saundra McClain, good-naturedly describes both the rewards and indignities of serving as a paternalistic white family's unofficial matriarch for 20 years. Samuel L. Jackson is just as vibrant as a fast-talking jive artist who wittily defends robbery as a form of sophisticated protest against economic injustice.

Without Davenport serving as a much-needed emotional anchor, there is little to bring us into the story's unfolding details. Even tensions between Davenport and the white Captain Charles Taylor (played by Tim Walsh with a Gomer Pyle-esque boobery) fail to elicit anything more than a few reactionary chuckles from the audience. Major plot points feel as though they're mumbled through

Samuel L. JacksonSergeant/Kiowa Man/Soldier/Kinsmen |Samuel L. JacksonOrdinance Officer/Deputy/Texas Ranger/1st Klansman/Old Cowhand/Farmer