It’s nighttime in Memphis and rain is pouring. Inside the Lorraine Motel, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lies with a fever and sore throat. Earlier—unknowingly, hours before his death—he had given his final speech, telling the audience at Mason Temple: “I’ve been to the mountaintop.”

While the speech became one of King’s most famous, we rarely think of its opening words. After being introduced by a colleague, King said, “I listened to [t]his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

As a play, The Mountaintop occupies the space between that “eloquent and generous introduction” and the man himself—between history and art, memory and truth. Specifically, The Mountaintop takes place in the hours after King’s speech and just before his death, expanding on historical events into a fictionalized encounter with a mysterious young woman. Written by Katori Hall and directed by Sinjin Jones, the current production at Mountain View’s Pear Theatre runs through Feb. 19, with a live streaming option available. The play runs in repertory with Sunset Baby, also directed by Jones, which extends the former play’s themes of civil rights into the present day.

Growing up, Jones remembers thinking, “Man, what we are reading in the context of this class doesn’t feel like enough.” Too often, history can feel like the story of larger-than-life heroes, far removed from our everyday experience. But behind the history books and speeches are imperfect people—even someone as lionized as Dr. King.

“I’ve always been interested in the stories behind the history,” Jones says. “[King] was pulled out of bed to do that speech. We don’t think about that when we think about the beauty and the awesomeness of his words. What does it take for someone to go deliver this speech in the pouring rain, exhausted and hoarse after traveling the country for so long?”

The story behind The Mountaintop mirrors the path of recent political history: it was first staged in 2009, on the heels of the election of Barack Obama, when pundits declared his presidency the culmination of Dr. King’s work (Obama himself often quoted King’s belief that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”). But by the time the play premiered at The Pear in 2016, much of that hope for change seemed to have curdled.

The Mountaintop draws from history, yet takes us beyond the historical record, leaving space for recontextualization with each staging and new interpretation.

“This play really takes a hard look at the history of the future,” Jones says, adding it “has a lot to do with what I believe our context is right now. Which is to say, I feel like there’s a lot of work to do.”

Part of the work to do is realizing that history is not a passive thing, but something we must continue to struggle with and lay claim to.

“We all have to figure out how we’re going to do this work, because we don’t have a Dr. Martin Luther King,” Jones says. “The things that we thought we had moved past, maybe we haven’t moved past as far as we thought. In the last five years, that has become pretty clear—that some of the wounds we thought we’d healed were maybe just Band-Aided over.”

And while much has changed since 1968, year after year King’s words find new resonance.

“I hope audiences leave with a sense [that King] passed the baton to us,” Jones says. “Who’s going to pick up the baton?”

Here, Jones’s words invoke King’s own conclusion on that rainy night in Memphis, looking ahead at what Jones calls “the history of the future.”

“I would like to live a long life,” King told his audience. “But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. And I may not get there with you. But I want you to know…that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

The Mountaintop
Through Feb 19, Various Times, $38
Pear Theatre, Mountain View

“The murder is really kind of incidental,” says Doll Piccotto. “You’ve got a body, and then there’s just a puzzle around it.”

As a director, dramaturge and certified mystery fanatic, Piccotto has a keen understanding of the era- and genre-transcending appeal of Agatha Christie. City Lights Theater’s production of Christie’s The Hollow, based on her novel of the same name, opens under Piccotto’s direction this Friday.

Piccotto is close with the author’s oeuvre, having directed The Hollow once before, as well as acted in another of Christie’s plays.

“The best part about being onstage in an Agatha Christie play is hearing people whispering to each other about who did it. Someone will come into the green room and say ‘Okay, everyone thinks Edward did it tonight!’ Suddenly, in that last scene, you feel this wave of realization echo across the audience.”

Piccotto tells Metro that the red herrings and unexpected twists of Christie’s novels caused a stir in her day. Her narration in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd made guessing the culprit so difficult that readers wrote into newspapers accusing the author of “cheating.”

Christie was no stranger to causing stirs. In 1926, she disappeared in a case that might sound familiar to fans of Gone Girl. Following the discovery of her husband’s affair, Christie went missing for 11 days, her car found at the bottom of a cliff. After much media frenzy, she was located in a hotel spa—in a room she’d booked under her husband’s mistress’s name. The situation was chalked up to stress-related “amnesia,” but one has to wonder if the author’s stories of betrayal and revenge may, at times, have been inspired by her own life.

Tension in The Hollow builds from a tangled web of relationships centered around the Angkatell family, whose idyllic weekend reunion at their country home comes to a brutal halt at the end of Act 1, with one member of the love hexagon dead and another found unexpectedly holding a gun.

Clearly something of a rebel against expectations of her time (Piccotto excitedly reveals Christie was one of the first English people to go surfing), Christie also wrote complex and multilayered women. The extended family centered in The Hollow includes “sensitive, bohemian artist” Henrietta, her cousin Midge, determined to stay financially independent from her family, and spacey Lady Angkatell, who often knows more than she lets on. These plot-driving ladies stand out—both in the context of the era she lived and wrote in, and on stage, where there’s still a dearth of female roles.

Silicon Valley Shakespeare, whom Piccotto has worked with since 2004, meets this dearth with their biannual all-female production. In a 2017 production of Hamlet, Piccotto played antagonist Claudius opposite Anne Yumi Kobori (now The Hollow’s Henrietta) in the title role.

“People came up to me after the show to say ‘I never thought about it like that!’ Women have a different take on things. I didn’t think of myself as a villain—I’m just trying to be a good stepdad! I mean, he truly believes he’d be the better king!”

The philosophy translates well into The Hollow, where each person in the house has potential motivations for the murder. Her conflicted, “completely imperfect” characters manage to stir empathy for the audience, even as each one falls under suspicion.

In recent years, a gruesome grandchild of the murder mystery and the procedural—true crime—has exploded in popularity, especially among women. Even adaptations of classic detective stories like Christie’s have gotten grittier and darker to match the desensitized modern palate.

“One thing I like about her stage plays is they’re written with tongue planted firmly in cheek. There’s always something a little goofy and campy, that makes it more of a cozy mystery. No one wants to see a dead body on stage for a very long time.”

Regardless of one’s aesthetic taste for fear and gore, piecing together the clues of a crime brings a sense of gratified discovery in a world where the constant inundation of conflicting information can be stupefying.

“Everything is laid out for you. She gives you everything. Even if you don’t figure it out, looking back you can put each piece together and find the solution. It’s satisfying because there’s a clear answer.”

The Hollow
Opens Thu, 8pm, $25+
City Lights Theatre, San Jose

Fans of the Fab Four will be pleased to hear that due to demand, a second matinee show has been added to the Montgomery Theater’s November 3 production of “In My Life: A Musical Theater Tribute to the Beatles.”

The show follows the career path of The Beatles starting from their early days in the Cavern Club in Liverpool, where they were discovered by their soon-to-be manager Brian Epstein. Epstein acts as the narrator throughout the show, giving the audience a unique perspective on the rock group’s immense talent and notorious infighting. The show moves through a variety of iconic Beatles moments: their first American press conference, The Ed Sullivan Show, Shea Stadium, Abbey Road Studios and the final live performance on the rooftop of their Apple Corp. offices.

Of course, what would a show about the Beatles be without the music? And who is qualified to play what are considered some of the greatest pop songs of all time? Luckily, the Beatles have spawned their own industry of tribute bands, each trying to one up the next in how veritable their imitation comes to the real thing. The show casts the Abbey Road Tribute Band as Beatles and they charge through 33 classic tracks throughout the show.

Discounted tickets for the added matinee show will be available August 30 to September 6. Prices range from $40-$60, but fans can get $10 off during the discount period by using the promo code “BEATLES” when they buy tickets.