Review: An Ascendant THE MOUNTAINTOP from Front Porch Arts Collective

Returning to his modest room at the Lorraine Motel after delivering his now historic “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated on the motel’s balcony, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. is contending with a smoker’s cough and eager to unwind with a cup of coffee when his life intersects, in an imagined meeting, with a mysterious chambermaid-turned-room-service waitress in writer and Memphis native Katori Hall’s thought-provoking drama, “The Mountaintop,” being presented by Front Porch Arts Collective in collaboration with Suffolk University’s Modern Theatre, where it is being staged through October 12.

At first, the play – which premiered on Broadway in 2011 in a production starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett – can seem talky, with time spent on mundane topics from King’s smelly feet to his proclivity for Pall Malls, but that’s what Katori was probably seeking to capture when she chose to write about King at a vulnerable moment in American history. The playwright brings him forward as a fully dimensional man, a Baptist preacher, husband, father, and orator extraordinaire. In doing so, she pulls the curtain back on King to reveal a flawed human being, not just the unchallenged icon of the Civil Rights movement.

We see the hole in his sock and witness him shading the truth when he phones his wife, the unseen – but no less a presence for that – Coretta Scott King. We also see him react, with almost instant flirting, to the maid he has just met. Katori’s writing on King’s real life staves off, at least briefly, the martyrdom that will subsume him in death, to provide a just-below-the-surface reveal of the true man.

Under the insightful direction of Maurice Emmanuel Parent, who played King in “The Mountaintop” at Central Square Theater in 2013, the Porch production features exquisitely drawn performances by its two leads, the superb Dominic Carter as King and the beguiling Kiera Prusmack as Camae, who comes from much farther away than a room-service kitchen and stays to impart some shattering news.

An actor of considerable gravitas, Carter expertly captures his character’s many emotions. This is not an impersonation, but a deeply affecting evocation of King. He is rarely still, always thinking and working on his next speech. When King lets his mind wander to past achievements, Carter deftly plays the truth in these moments – that King still has the big dreams that have always propelled him to make a difference. And, he is planning for what he wants to see happen in the future.

Prusmack has many vibrant, feisty, even funny moments, but the one that makes the greatest impression comes when King asks Camae what she would say if speaking in front of thousands of people, as he so often does. Atop one of the motel room beds and with King’s suit jacket around her shoulders, Camae powerfully delivers a speech questioning King’s own nonviolent approach.

King’s “promised land” may seem more out of reach today than it has at any moment in the past six decades, but this play reminds us that there are few more worthwhile struggles than those for equality and justice for all.

The designs, like the overall production, are first-rate, from scenic designer Ben Lieberson’s faithful recreation of the Lorraine Motel, enhanced by Christina Ostner’s well-chosen period props, to costumer Kiara Escalara’s 1960’s suit for King and starched maid’s uniform for Camae. Projection designer Pamela Herson, lighting designer Brian Lilienthal, and sound designer Joshua Jackson create the stormy night outside the Lorraine that foreshadows menace throughout, and the unfurling fabric panels depicting the future that will come after King.