They say “You never want to meet your heroes,” a statement that can certainly be bandied about when discussing Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop which opened this past weekend at River & Rail Theatre Company. In it, we do meet one of our heroes—fictionally, anyway—the most central figure in the American Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The one-act play’s setting is simple: 3 April, 1968. Room 306, Lorraine Motel, Memphis, Tennessee—the day before Dr. King was assassinated and the place where he spent his last night. While the setting is simple, there is nothing simple about the exploration and dramatic journey on which Hall takes the audience—one where reality and fantasy collide.
In Memphis in support of striking black Memphis Sanitation Department employees, Dr. King (Jamal Sterling) has returned to his motel room, tired and downhearted, having just delivered his prophetic “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech at a rally at Mason Temple. Hall’s image of King here, fleshed out by director Rico Bruce Wade, is the other side of the hero coin. Instead of strength, courage, and morality, we see the imperfect human being who has sacrificed good health, struggles with writer’s block, is overwhelmed by paranoia and mistrust, and has a weakness for women.
Weary and unable to make any progress on writing a speech titled “Why America is Going to Hell,” King goes to the telephone—after checking it for FBI bugs—and gets the motel desk to send up a cup of coffee to go with the pack of Pall Malls that he hopes will be coming soon with his friend and colleague, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy. The coffee arrives carried by an attractive and flirty motel maid, Camae (Jaquai Wade Pearson), who explains that it is her first day on the job. Their simple chit-chat turns more structural, comedic, and insightful and we begin to feel that this isn’t just a chance encounter. The interaction between them is an intricate character construction that the playwright slowly and carefully builds on. Hall provides the actors with the rich, textural material—God, violence and non-violence, smoking, Malcolm X, smelly feet—piling tension onto philosophical tension, allowing simplicity to somehow become sophisticated commentary through the rich use of language, eventually suggesting that there is probably more to Camae than meets the eye.
For the first two-thirds of the 90-minute act of The Mountaintop, the dramatic intensity of the beautifully created and honed performances by Sterling and Pearson ebb and flow between them in the way that one always hopes for in a two-character drama. I must refrain from commenting on the last third, though, for therein lies a special dramatic revelation that simply must be experienced in the theatre for its poetry and power.
Director Wade and Scenic Designer Scott Baron have offered up a minimal, but probably quite accurate, set of the Lorraine Motel room complete with period props and cloying colors (salmon pink and bile yellow) matched to the original ones from the 60s. Jordan Vera’s lighting did double duty, becoming a quasi-character companion with Lucas Swinehart’s thunder and ambient rain sound that runs throughout. These are not random sounds, but rather are necessary punctuations as accompaniment for Sterling and Pearson’s critical narrative points of dialog.
Highly Recommended —The Mountaintop is long on intrigue and importance as theatre. Even more, it challenges the audience’s perceptions and dares them to look at history through different eyes.
River & Rail Theatre Company’s The Mountaintop by Katori Hall continues at the Old City Performing Arts Center (111 State Street) through March 5—Thursdays thru Saturdays at 7:30 PM and Sundays at 2:30 PM. Tickets and Information
