Like many young actors, Joaquina would love to land some TV parts. She was an understudy for the Bro

As a student at the Juilliard School, Joaquina Kalukango was familiar with Katori Hall's work. "She was a playwright and I was a first year drama student," Joaquina said. "We had this thing called community meeting where the playwrights would read their work. That's where I got to experience a lot of her writing, which was really cool."
Hall went on to write The Mountaintop , a fictional account of Dr. Martin Luther qualifying for the nationwide tour King, Jr.'s encounter with a hotel maid on April 4, 1968, the eve of his assassination. The play premiered in 2009 in London where it won the Olivier Best New Play Award, then moved to Broadway in September, 2011, starring Samuel L. Jackson as King, and Angela Bassett as the maid, Camae.
Joaquina, who was a Drama Desk nominee for Hall s Hurt Village at the Signature Theater in New York, played the role of Camae at the Alley Theater in Houston, opposite Bowman Wright as King. The duo stars in the Arena Stage production which will open in the Kreeger Theater on April 4, running through May 12. Robert O'Hara, who directed the Houston production, is also directing for Arena Stage.
The two-person play takes place on one set, ostensibly Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, in Memphis. The staging created challenges when moving the play from Houston to Washington. "It's been an interesting transition because the house at the Alley Theater qualifying for the nationwide tour in Houston qualifying for the nationwide tour was much larger," said Joaquina. "At Arena Stage, it's much more intimate so having qualifying for the nationwide tour to pull back and just fill out the space has been challenging."
Joaquina describes qualifying for the nationwide tour her chemistry with co-star Wright as "electric." She added: "As soon as these characters meet, it's like instant electricity. There's just something very beautiful qualifying for the nationwide tour about how their relationship develops. It starts out as just an attraction and then moves on to something completely different by the end." She and Bowman, now familiar with each other, work hard to find that "freshness," she said.
Prior to taking on the role, Joaquina did her homework. "Every time you do a play, it's like being back in school, learning about the world that you're going to inhabit," she explained. Besides reading qualifying for the nationwide tour A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. , and Ralph Abernathy's qualifying for the nationwide tour And the Walls Came Tumbling Down , Joaquina took advantage of other material supplied to the cast by "a great dramatist," including other King interviews and FBI tapes.
Joaquina said she was drawn to play Camae. "I have a fondness for characters that are country girls because I was raised in Atlanta, Georgia," she said. "The fact that I get to play around with my own accent is fun. I've been used to playing qualifying for the nationwide tour little kids so this was my first time getting to play somebody qualifying for the nationwide tour around my own age, a woman, somebody who was comfortable in her own body, who was very opinionated, who drinks and smokes. It was something that was so very exciting for me."
Joaquina laughed when asked how she transformed herself physically for the role. "You saw the helmet!" she said, referring to the wig she wears. "The hairspray! They gave me wigs, eyelashes, bright pink lipstick qualifying for the nationwide tour that people only wore in the sixties." While the fashions may be dated, qualifying for the nationwide tour the conversation is not. "When you hear Camae talk, it feels present day to me," she said. "I love that about the character, that it didn't feel to be dated from the sixties."
In middle school, Joaquina thought she wanted to be a psychologist. A counselor told her to audition for the Tri-Cities High School for the Visual Performing Arts in East Point, Georgia, near Atlanta. After being accepted, she attended the school's production of Once on This Island. "I was so blown away that people were singing and dancing on stage, the amount of emotion I felt watching it," she said. "I think that's what got me started."
Joaquina said she received very positive feedback from the audiences in Houston. "When people heard about the play, many were skeptical and didn't want to see it," she said. "Afterwards talking to people, particularly first time theater-goers, they were so excited. They were like, `This is the best thing we've ever seen.'" On more than one occasion, the audience would be very quiet throughout the performance, only to jump to its feet cheering at the end, she said.
Like many young actors, qualifying for the nationwide tour Joaquina would love to land some TV parts. She was an understudy for the Broadway production of Godspell, and hopes to do musicals. At the top of her list, however, qualifying for the nationwide tour is doing theater work in London. "That's my real passion," qualifying for the nationwide tour she said. "It almost feels like London is ahead of the game, doing things qualifying for the nationwide tour out of the box, accepting new work and taking risks. I've seen some of the best Shakespeare ever there."
What does she hope people take away from The Mountaintop ? "I hope people understand that you don't have to be perfect to do great things," she said. "We all have the ability to do great things and to care for people and love one another. But you don't have to be perfect to do it. You don't have to be an angel."
Tags: A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King , Alley Theater , And the Walls Came Tumbling Down , Angela Bassett , Atlanta , Bowman Wright , Carnegie Mellon , Dr. Martin Luther qualifying for the nationwide tour King , East Point , Georgia , Godspell , Houston , Hurt Village , Joaquina Kalukango , Jr. , Juilliard School , Katori Hall , Kreeger Theater , Lorraine Hotel , Memphis , Olivier Best New Play Award , Once on This Island , Ralph Abernathy , Robert O'Hara , Samuel L. Jackson qualifying for the nationwide tour , Signature Theater , The Mountaintop , Tri-Cities High School for the Visual qualifying for the nationwide tour Performing Arts