One Night in Miami...

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.