Two strangers talk in a motel room, the neon light outside illuminates the curtained window.
Two people talking might be the fundamental unit of politics, or of faith. If that’s true of life, it’s doubly true of theater, which condenses ideas and experiences to their essence.
Playwright Katori Hall has boiled the Civil Rights movement down to those two people talking in a motel room in The Mountaintop, which imagines the night of April 3, 1968, the night before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
A storm brews up outside, and King, having just delivered his “Mountaintop” speech, returns to his regular room in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he falls into conversation with Camae, a 20-something chambermaid. The play and its background can’t help but be heavy with King’s imminent death, but The Mountaintop, now in a vivid production at Northern Stage’s Barrette Center for the Arts in White River Junction, is infused with the power and light of its historical moment.
The Mountaintop is historical fiction, but based largely on facts about King’s life, and the deepening depression that surrounded his final year. Hall introduces the audience to King, the man, as he is behind closed doors. He smoked, he drank and was known to have extramarital affairs, and Hall doesn’t stint in putting King’s entire character on the stage.
The play is poised at the moment when King’s nonviolent protests were increasingly called into question by others in the African American community who saw violence, or the threat of it, as the fastest way to effect change. In 1968, even as support for the Vietnam War waned, King was condemned when he came out publicly against it. In The Mountaintop, Hall doesn’t attempt to knock King from the pedestal we’ve placed him on. She brings the audience in close to see him as a man so we can envision ourselves as people who also have the potential to do great things, big or small.
The Mountaintop opens as King (played by Charlie Hudson III) returns to Room 306. He is weary, exhausted, and coughing. At 39, he appears to be on the verge of a heart attack. Camae (Brittany Bellizaire) says, “Civil rights‘ll kill ya fo’ them Pall Malls will.”
A two-character play is especially challenging for the actors. Northern Stage’s casting is exceptional, bringing two actors new to the company to tackle these roles.
Bellizeare captures a half-dozen personae wrapped up in Camae, who is in her first day on the job at the Lorraine. She’s a flirt, a bit of a temptress, too smart to be working as a maid and is captivated by visions of Detroit. She’s frank and “swears like a sailor with the clap,” one feature of a play that might be best for audiences age 13 and up. She’s also a dutiful employee, an admirer of King, and perhaps, someone sent to take him down. Camae even gets up the courage to step into his shoes, literally, for a moment and preach to an invisible audience with her call for justice, her revolutionary answer to the peace marches.
Bellizeare steps deftly through these subtle changes of character, voice and temperament, finally bringing King to a boiling point of fear, rage, and finally, acceptance.
The roster of actors who have portrayed King is an illustrious one. Samuel L. Jackson took it on in The Mountaintop when the play was on Broadway in 2011.
At Northern Stage, Hudson takes command of a role that calls on him to portray a sinner and saint, the greatest American orator of his time, the leader of the Civil Rights movement and its people. He is a man who is fearful and tired, yet willing to be flirtatious and teasing. He roars, laughs and weeps. Hudson is blessed with a voice that needs no amplification. It is rich, resonant and rings throughout the theater as if from a mountaintop.
Director Carol Dunne’s confidence in her choice of play and in the actors comes across in the surety of staging, pacing and character development. The play connects the events and ideas of nearly 50 years ago to the current American conversation about race and civil rights.
Shawn Sturdevant’s costume designs are simple but exacting. Set designer Caite Hevner Kemp previously designed sets for Clybourne Park and Orwell in America for Northern Stage, and for The Mountaintop she has crafted a note perfect mid-century motel room, with salmon-colored bedspreads and curtains and gold carpeting. Kemp also designed projections that play on the curtains and motel room walls. The projections are part of the script, but they seemed jarringly out of place in a play in which a rotary phone is the height of technology.
King said he had been to the mountaintop. Northern Stage’s production of The Mountaintop gives us all a chance to see the man himself in all his complexity.
Northern Stage’s production of
Correction
By April 1968, public support for the Vietnam War was well below 50 percent. Support for the war at that moment was overstated in an earlier version of this review.