One Night in Miami...

Description

25 February 1964: 22-year-old Cassius Clay, soon to be Muhammad Ali, has just won the world heavyweight boxing title. Instead of hitting the town, he chooses to celebrate in a Miami hotel room with three close friends - activist Malcolm X, singer Sam Cooke and American football star Jim Brown. This fictional account of a real night imagines what might have happened in that tiny hotel room. As the Civil Rights movement stirs outside, and the melody of 'A Change is Gonna Come' hangs in the air, four men will emerge from that one night ready to define a new world. Kemp Powers' award-winning debut play One Night in Miami... deftly combines the personal and the political at a pivotal moment in history; it received the Ted Schmitt Award 2013 for its world premiere, and went on to be adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by Regina King in 2020. It is published here in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series with a brand new introduction by Matthew Xia.

Kemp Powers won the 2013 Ted Schmitt Award for outstanding world premiere of a new play for One Night in Miami. The play's Los Angeles premiere at Rogue Machine Theatre won three LA Drama Critics Circle Awards, four NAACP Theatre Awards and one LA Weekly Theater Award, including two for Playwriting. His other plays include Little Black Shadows, The Two Reds and Christa McAuliffe's Eyes Were Blue. His work has been developed at the Pacific Playwrights Festival, the Colorado New Play Summit and the Classical Theatre of Harlem. He is a founding member of The Temblors playwrights collective in Los Angeles, where he resides.

Crackling good dialogue and timely themes ... Powers weaves together multiple strains of plot and character with a seasoned pro's skill. His mission to present a believable slice-of-life with contemporary resonance is, like Clay's, achieved in a decisive knockout. * Variety * An astounding debut for playwright Kemp Powers ... Superb across the board ... breathtakingly good. There just aren't enough superlatives. Powerful, funny, exhilarating - what a play. * ArtsBeatLA * In less than ninety minutes, a long, difficult chapter of American history seems to sweep by. The mind keeps flashing back and forward, even as the play grips us with the immediacy of the hotel room. Great theater hits you hard and in many places. That's exactly what you get from the powers of this play. * Baltimore Sun *