By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — Katori Hall was 28-years old when she wrote the imagined sequence of her play, ‘The Mountaintop’—now in its West Coast premiere at the San Diego Repertory Theater. Although she hails from Memphis, and recalls her mother’s anguish on the night of April 4, 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down outside Room 306 of the city’s Lorraine Motel, Ms. Hall is nonetheless of the generation of King’s legacy—not of his lifetime.
That is why her bittersweet, 96-minute play is so remarkable. The somewhat disarming moments of sexual clowning notwithstanding, and even with the forced anachronisms (i.e. cell phones, room service at the Lorraine) and out-of-context assertions (God is a “she”), the play is an intuitive tapestry of a great man’s deepest torment, conflicts, and, yes, libido.
Katori Hall may not have ever known Martin Luther King Jr., and she molds his fantasized final night with certain postmodern clichés and tabloid references that are unfortunately pigeonholed as “Negro talk,’ but she discerns one thing about King that resonates true: the man lived with fear. And if you don’t know that Martin Luther King Jr. coexisted with, was haunted by, and sometimes made mistakes out of fear, then you don’t know all that much about Martin Luther King Jr.
Ms. Hall, who was born thirteen years after the MLK assassination, is nonetheless deeply acquainted with the facts and narrative of King’s short life. She knows about his campaign failures, such as the Albany, Ga. setback of 1962 (when the local white sheriff outwitted King’s civil disobedience maneuvers) as well as his triumphant March on Washington (“I Have A Dream”) of 1963. She is impeccable with such details as the exact time of the assassination (6:01 PM).
She is scholarly enough to discern the historical skepticism that attended King’s career in his final months. She knows that he was bowed with both guilt and depression and, without being declarative, allows for these burdens to fuel his restless indulgences, such as smoking and philandering.
The text of the play has little to do with the facts of what King did and where he went after his prophetic ‘Mountaintop’ speech, extemporized at the Mason Temple on the stormy night of April 3. Ironically, the sense of confinement, even entrapment, with a sexually-charged, foul-mouthed, literally angelic room service maid in Room 306 defies the very restiveness and nomadic nature of MLK’s spirit—especially at the end of his days. But to paraphrase the preacher himself, “It doesn’t really matter now.” That’s because Ms. Hall has written a play that captures the imprisonment of King’s soul.
Here is the magic and deftness of director Roger Smith’s San Diego production. With a dramaturgical paintbrush, working with the canvas of lyrical writing, and with the benefit of gifted actors whose names (unlike the Broadway production) don’t overshadow the subject matter, Smith blends light, pillow feathers, video imagery, and sound that support the two performers’ athletic talents into a realization of the larger issues: mortality, faith, human flaws, and the vapor of fame.
Larry Bates doesn’t attempt to replicate King as much as he successfully creates a man ensnared by his own life’s chronicle. The vitality of his performance is that you consider your own impermanence more than gauging this artist’s understated mimicry of the legend. Danielle Moné Truitt, playing a character who never existed but who lives in every defeated corner of African American womanhood, plants her legs firmly on the stage and all but dances through a heartbreaking transition from coquettish free spirit to an angel who knows how to read the deepest pain of a frightened young man’s aged heart.
This play, as staged in downtown San Diego, is about why and what we humans do to kill each other’s spirits.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com