The Mountaintop
Garden Theatre, Winter Garden FL
by Carl F. Gauze
Starring Essex O’Brien and Anita Whitney Bennett
On a dark and rainy night in Memphis, Martin Luther King (O’Brian) checks into the Lorraine Hotel, an operation that caters to Blacks in the racially divided south. He send his assistant Ralph Abernathy out to get cigarettes, unpacks, and calls room service to get a cup of coffee. In a few minutes, a young housekeeper Camea (Bennet) appears with coffee, cigarettes, and small talk. King had just delivered his famous “I’ve Been to The Mountaintop” speech, and he’s planning his next “event.” They share a cigarette, they flirt, but mostly they talk about King’s fight for equality. Abernathy never does reappear, and King calls his wife who is suspicious there a someone else in his room. Women have a knack for that, I guess. King coughs constantly, and while there were many things blacks could not do, smoking themselves to death was not on that prohibited list. Tomorrow would be the biggest and worst day of King’s life, but he’s ready for it with the help of this hotel angel.
Set in a mid-century hotel, the show is both compact and wide ranging. It paints King as both idealist and a practical politician; he set on righting centuries of social wrongs knowing progress is enormously hard. But King also knows the limits of what effect he might produce, the risk he’s taking on, and that while he can’t change the whole world, he can push it along to a better place. O’Brien finds himself world weary, addicted to nicotine and tiring of life on the road. Only his sense of justice keeps him in motion. Camea begins as starstruck and flirty, but she, too, has a larger goal to push King to his next level. There’s a physical attraction, but Camea is really a messenger from a higher plane, here to make King’s next step easier and more palatable. While a social message hangs heavily over this play, so does a kind of inspired humanity. Yes, this is a “message” play, but its not a lecture. Mostly it shows one man’s dedication to not just a job but an ideal, and how he has worn himself to a stub fighting for that one dream he has: equality.
