The Mountaintop

Pacific Theatre until June 11, 2022
Tickets from $15 at pacifictheatre.org or 604-731-5518

Posted May 24, 2022

Written by Pulitzer-winning playwright Katori Hall in 2009, The Mountaintop begins in a motel room in the Lorraine, a just-okay 60s Memphis motel – twin beds, old-style box TV – and ends in a blazing montage of clips (by projection designer Wladimiro A Woyno R) from American history. It’s a compelling journey made even more exhilarating by the outstanding performances by Kwesi Ameyaw and Shayna Jones.

It’s April 3, 1968, the night before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s now famous, “I have been to the mountaintop” speech and his assassination. He’s out of smokes and it seems room service has quit for the night but King being such a steady customer of the Lorraine, a cup of coffee is brought up to him by the newly-hired Camae, a flirty, outspoken slip of a thing. As luck would have it, Camae smokes Pall Malls, too, so she lights him up. In more ways than one.

What an exquisite pairing of actors. Ameyaw (as King) and Jones (Camae) play out the playwright’s imagined eve of the assassination. Will Camae be able to seduce pastor King – even as he is talking on the phone to his wife Coretta? Is he willing to be seduced?

But there is so much more going on in this motel room than the potential for seduction – or, rather, the seduction isn’t so much sexual as it is philosophical/political. Struggling with the speech he plans to give the next day, King challenges Camae (who has been implying King’s non-violent approach isn’t working) to tell him what he ought to say. She demands his suit jacket and his shoes – which he removes and she dons – and then she’s up on one of those twin beds, letting it rip. Jones delivers a riveting piece of theatre as Camae, imitating King’s deep, rallying voice and big gestures, gives the speech she wants him to give – more Malcolm X than Martin Luther King.

Ameyaw draws a portrait of King that is at once proud and confident but also beset by insecurity. He shows us a self-assured character who, in a premonition of his own death, has a meltdown every time there is a flash of lightning: fragile and frightened, he confesses to Camae, “I am a man”. Not a saint, just a man.

In a fascinating turn of events, playwright Hall takes us into deeper, darker waters as King faces his mortality: Camae is not who she pretends to be.

Directed by Omari Newton, The Mountaintop is a terrific vehicle for Ameyaw and Jones but it’s also a comprehensive, theatrical look at what has – or hasn’t – happened in the US following King’s assassination by James Earl Ray at 6:01pm, the day after the playwright’s imagined meeting between King and Camae. From King’s speech that day:
“We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop … I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land”.

King could not have foreseen how far off that Promised Land would be, how long it would take to get there.

Terrific theatre, stellar performances, provocative politics. Pacific Theatre at its best.