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Appomattox
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 racism.Appomattox premiered at the McGuire Proscenium Stage in the Guthrie Theater on 5 October, 2012.
144 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2012
3 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Hampton
112 books23 followersChristopher James Hampton CBE, FRSL is a British playwright, screen writer and film director. He is best known for his play based on the novel Les Liaisons dangereuses and the film version Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and also more recently for writing the nominated screenplay for the film adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement.
Hampton became involved in the theatre while studying German and French at Oxford University where OUDS performed his play When Did You Last See My Mother?, about adolescent homosexuality, reflecting his own experiences at Lancing College, the boarding school he had attended. The play was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and that production soon transferred to the Comedy Theatre, resulting in Hampton, in 1966, becoming the youngest writer to have a play performed in the West End in the modern era.
From 1968-70 he worked as the Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre, and also as the company's literary manager. Hampton won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1988 for the screen adaptation of his play Dangerous Liaisons. He was nominated again in 2007 for adapting Ian McEwan's novel Atonement. Hampton forthcoming project is the translation into English of Michael Kunze & Sylvester Levay's Austrian musical Rebecca based on Daphne du Maurier's book which is scheduled to premiere in 2009 in Canada, and then move to Broadway in 2010.
Hampton became involved in the theatre while studying German and French at Oxford University where OUDS performed his play When Did You Last See My Mother?, about adolescent homosexuality, reflecting his own experiences at Lancing College, the boarding school he had attended. The play was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and that production soon transferred to the Comedy Theatre, resulting in Hampton, in 1966, becoming the youngest writer to have a play performed in the West End in the modern era.
From 1968-70 he worked as the Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre, and also as the company's literary manager. Hampton won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1988 for the screen adaptation of his play Dangerous Liaisons. He was nominated again in 2007 for adapting Ian McEwan's novel Atonement. Hampton forthcoming project is the translation into English of Michael Kunze & Sylvester Levay's Austrian musical Rebecca based on Daphne du Maurier's book which is scheduled to premiere in 2009 in Canada, and then move to Broadway in 2010.
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