Book description
4th March, 1865: On the night of his second inauguration, a few
weeks before his assassination, Abraham Lincoln meets the veteran
black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the White House to discuss
the prospect of extending the vote to black men who have served in the
soon to be victorious Union armies. 4th March, 1965: In the White
House, Lyndon Johnson, anxious to introduce a new Voting Rights Act,
is briefed by his sinister and "unfirable" FBI director, J.
Edgar Hoover, on the imminent Selma to Montgomery march, led by Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.. It is a demonstration prompted by a state
trooper's murder of the young activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, in Marion,
Alabama, following a rally in support of voter registration in Perry
County. In his ambitious new play, commissioned by the Guthrie
Theater, Minneapolis as the centrepiece of a retrospective of his
plays and films, Christopher Hampton traces a line which runs from the
last days of a brutal Civil War to the high-water mark of the Civil
Rights movement and on, all the way to the present day; and considers
the agonisingly slow healing of a wound, universal, but especially
deep and painful in America: racism. Appomattox premiered at the
McGuire Proscenium Stage in the Guthrie Theater on 5 October, 2012.
Christopher Hampton was born in the Azores in 1946. He wrote his
first play, When Did You Last See My Mother? at the age of eighteen.
Since then, his plays have included The Philanthropist, Savages, Tales
from Hollywood, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, White Chameleon and The
Talking Cure. He has translated plays by Ibsen, Moliere, von Horvath,
Chekhov and Yasmina Reza (including Art and Life x 3). His television
work includes adaptations of The History Man and Hotel du Lac. His
screenplays include The Honorary Consul, The Good Father, Dangerous
Liaisons, Mary Reilly, Total Eclipse, The Quiet American, Carrington,
The Secret Agent and Imagining Argentina, the last three of which he
also directed, and most recently A Dangerous Method, based on his play
The Talking Cure.
