Review: Portland Stage Examines Martin Luther King as Man and Myth

Revisiting the traumas of the 1960s has been the subject of two recent plays which have debuted in Portland. After Rob Urbinati's monumental Mama's Boy at the Good, Portland stage is now presenting Katori Hall's poetic play about Martin Luther King, To the Mountaintop.

Hall's drama, which won the 2009 Olivier award and had a successful run on Broadway, seeks to discover the man behind the martyr, the completely flawed and very human King who attained the stature he did through personal as well as social struggle. Like its protagonist, Hall's play, beginning in the banal, rises to greater heights as the evening progresses. An early work, some of the dialogue is contrived, and the entire piece needs some tightening especially in the opening segment. But once the drama shifts from the real to the metaphoric, Hall finds her stride; the characters blossom; their words attain the rhythm of poetry, and the drama - a kind of Gethsemane for Dr. King -builds to its inevitable, shattering conclusion. Throughout, Hall deftly blends irreverent humor with eloquent rhetoric, and Camae's visionary speech with its layers of Whitmanesque imagery and its rap rhythms (enhanced visually by black/white projections of 60s news photos) becomes the play's high point.

Director Charles Weldon brings a potentially static two-person interaction to life, keeping the actors moving and investing the characters with quirky and lively energy. Kim Staunton proves to be an electric Camae, street walker turned angel, funny, brash, and ultimately compassionately wise. As Martin Luther King, Harvy Blanks is encumbered by iconic images of the great man and challenged to make the part his own. Though the cadences of his speech - excellent as they are in reproducing the southern dialect - do not closely mirror those of the historical King, he does succeed in capturing the fire of the man's rhetoric even in the personal circumstances depicted by the playwright, and his last speech moments before his assassination rises to noble dignity.

Anita Stewart's set perfectly recreates the blandness of the Lorraine Motel and offers a few poetic touches such as the flowers, representing King's daughter's prayers that erupt through the dull carpet. The stage is evocatively lit by Ves Weaver to suggest the transitions between vision and reality, and Weaver creates a chilling moment when a lurid glare beyond the motel door conjures up King's fear of death. Gregg Carville provides an excellent soundscape with popular 60s tunes as mood music, as well as the ominous rumblings of thunder and the deluge of rain which mark the fateful night.

To the Mountaintop represents Katori Hall's attempt to strip away legend and to humanize Dr. King, but in doing so, both playwright and the entire Portland Stage company create a hero and a drama far more moving and memorable than mere myth.

Photo Courtesy Portland Stare, Aaron Flacke, photographer

To the Mountaintop runs from November 3 -22, 2015 at Portland Stage, 25A Forest Ave., Portland, ME www.portlandstage.org 207-774-0465

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