Brian Slattery Photo
Riggins and West in “The Mountaintop.”
The fluorescent overhead lights were still on in Collective Consciousness Theater, in Erector Square. Actor Terrence Riggins was seated at a desk on the set for The Mountaintop. Fellow actor Malia West was standing in front of him. Neither of them were in costume yet, and West had a decidedly anachronistic plastic water in her hand. But as soon as Riggins and West fell into character, running through a scene late in the play, their voices changed, taking on a stronger Southern accent. Their body language shifted. They became the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Camae, a maid at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. It was 1968, and it was King’s last night on earth, and in The Mountaintop, he was working on a speech.
“Preacher King,” West said, imploringly.
“My country ‘tis of thee,” Riggins said, head bent to his notepad, writing.
“You’re making my job harder — ” West said, tapping her hand on the desk, trying to interrupt.
“My country who doles out constant misery,” Riggins said, still writing.
“Harder than it already is,” West said, more urgently.
“Hard on you?” Riggins said, finally looking up, fire in his eyes. “What about it being hard on me? On my family? On Corrie? On the movement?”
They were getting the timing of those interjecting lines just right. They switched out of character again and talked about it. Then ran it again, dropping right back in.
Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop, which opens at Collective Consciousness Theater on Thursday Jan. 19 and runs through Feb. 4, imagines how King might have spent some of his final hours in his room at the Lorraine Motel, in between visits from civil rights leader and close friend Ralph Abernathy. He was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike that, he hoped, would be a step in the Poor People’s Campaign, an effort he’d announced months before that he hoped would unite people of all races and ethnicities under the common cause of greater economic justice and equality. It was a turning point in King’s efforts, a vast broadening of the scope of his work. It created tension even within the civil rights movement — and, as it turned out, it didn’t survive long after he died.
The Mountaintop uses a classic theater form — it’s just two people alone on a single set — to capture King at his most ambitious and his most vulnerable, a man already aware of his place in history but all too cognizant of the fragility of what he has accomplished. Camae serves as friend and foil, by turns challenging and sympathetic. She knows who King is, but isn’t so impressed that she can’t tease him for the loftiness of some of his ambitions, or cast doubts on his (or anyone’s) abilities to change the enormous, deeply rooted problems that he has turned his attentions to.
“I love the play,” said Dexter Singleton, CCT’s executive artistic director, and “Dr. King’s message is always timely whatever the year.” He had decided long before the election to stage The Mountaintop, in part because it would mark the first time a Hall play has been performed in the New Haven area. “It’s long overdue,” Singleton said. Though even he was surprised at just how relevant the play has become.
“It just became so timely,” he said.
But The Mountaintop isn’t just a message play, as Hall digs into the man behind the myth. On the page, King is fully human, airing his fears and his flaws along with his ambitions. He’s not even immune — quite touchingly so — to the self-pity for the burden he finds himself carrying that, it’s entirely believable, might well have plagued him when he was able to let his guard down. (“Why me?” King says, at his most despairing. “Why not you?” Camae answers.)
“King is the most well-known black American in the history of the world, and he’s considered to be saintlike,” Singleton said. But in working on the play, a different portrait emerged of the civil rights leader, as “an ordinary man chosen for an extraordinary task.” And “at times he felt overwhelmed by the moment and the pressure to be a superhero.”
By 1968, “he was becoming disillusioned,” said Riggins. King had talked about the impossibility of “segregating his morality — he couldn’t separate his activism against the war [in Vietnam] with his activism for civil rights.” But he ran up against the fact that, as he sought to broaden his work, “people feel abandoned. They want to claim you.”
“This was a movement where he was picked as the leader,” West said. But “it was still a movement, and it could go in any direction” — and in 1968, it was unclear what that direction should be. The play “gives you the opportunity to see King as someone with fear,” West added. “Yet he persevered.”
Exploring the limitations of the man, however, ultimately has deepened the actors’ sense of responsibility in portraying King in The Mountaintop, especially now.
“I think this is an incredible story to tell, because there’s a new generation coming up,” West said. “People are looking for a role to play in the coming sociopolitical climate.”
“King committed to the wonderful evolution of mankind,” Riggins said. But ultimately — echoing a line from the play — it was about “passing the baton. We’re only carrying it temporarily and then we’ll be gone.”
As Riggins, Singleton, and West prepared for their run-through, there were countless small discussions among director, cast, and crew. A small list of odds and ends to take care of to prepare for the opening: batteries, a phone cord. They double-checked some special effects: projections on the back wall, a lighting effect through the hotel window, a flower that grows through the rug in the floor. Should the feathers that come down from the ceiling be the same color as the pillows in the room? What color should West’s lipstick be?
Riggins and West got into costume. The lights came down for rehearsal. Riggins and West took their positions, and the work began.
The Mountaintop runs at Collective Consciousness Theater in Erector Square, 315 Peck St. (Studio D, Building 6 West, 2nd floor). Performances run Thursday to Sunday at 8:00 p.m. from Jan. 19 to Feb. 4. Tickets are $25 for adults, $10 for students. Click here to buy tickets in advance.
