The Mountaintop
The Mountaintop
By Katori Hall
Directed by Stephen Jones
Starring Clinton C.H. Harris and Felichia Chivaughn
Mad Cow Theatre, Orlando FL</strong>
Dr. Martin Luther King (Harris) settles into the musty Lorraine Motel in Memphis the night before he is to die. His buddy Ralph Abernathy is off getting cigarettes, it’s pouring down rain, and he’s got a raspy throat. Tomorrow is a big speech and a march for the Sanitation Workers of Memphis, but now all he really needs is a cup of coffee. That comes courtesy of Room Service via attractive Camae (Chivaughn). She begins to leave, but stays as she essential to this two person cast. They chat and we learn about King’s background and plans, his frustration with marches turning into riots, the FBI, the press, and a thousand other devils besetting a man of action. Camae revels little other than she drink and smokes and lets the occasion profanity slip, just like the Dr. King does. We discover her deep secret about halfway along, and then we slip from a reasonable review of civil rights history into an oddly antic theological mess complete with a video montage of Dr. King’s post death impact.
I was impressed by the cast and the production although the video montage at the end felt preachy. Harris captures King’s internal tension beautifully, and he has that rising preacher cant that makes you come down to the river whether you had planned to or not. Ms. Chivaughn is cute and flirty and did a good job giving her own rabble rousing speech mirroring King’s word of tolerance and cooperation with those of continued separation and war on the whites. The set (Nick Murphy) looks musty and even had partial curtains that looked exactly like I remember from the cheap roadside hotels of old family vacations.
My issues here lie in the script, and these next lines contain a spoiler. King becomes enraged when he suspects Camae is an FBI plant, but has almost no reaction when she reveals a supernatural origin. Her past and her mission are not that far from “It’s A Wonderful Life” and we go through the standard tropes of what I call “Fringe Festival Theology”: having to complete some mission in order to find your own redemption, phone calls to God who is off raining on a forest fire, breasts as wings, and gender swapping in heaven. There’s even a pillow fight and some anachronistic technology. I’ll give author Katori the benefit of the doubt and believe she was attempting to lighten up an otherwise dark piece of theatre. But what I saw trivialized Dr. Kings work and what we can reasonable assume his beliefs were, and that lessens the impact of a tragic even from a stormy era of our recent history.
For more information on Mad Cow, please visit http://www.madcowtheatre.com
