APT Opens its Season with a Stunning Journey to "The Mountaintop"

Last summer American Players Theatre produced a series of staged readings over Zoom, to keep spirits up and audiences engaged while we all waited out the COVID-19 restrictions that closed down all live, in-person events. One of the most intriguing evenings featured APT Core Company Member Gavin Lawrence and Chicago-based actress Sola Thompson in a reading of Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop.

The two-hander imagines an encounter that might have taken place on the night before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. After delivering his sermon, “I Have Been to the Mountaintop,” Dr. King (Lawrence) is trying to unwind in his hotel room when he strikes up a conversation with Camae (Thompson), a maid who brings him room service. Over the course of the stormy evening the two flirt and argue while discussing politics and religion. In between chain-smoking Pall Malls and ducking for cover at every crash of thunder, King grapples with his mortality, his disillusionment, his ambitious plans for the future and his aching weariness.

With this intriguing premise, the play was superbly performed from the actors’ living rooms and delivered over a computer screen for a limited audience, for one night only. After seeing the reading, I hoped that APT would mount a full production play as part of its regular season at some point. And then it happened.

On Sunday, May 16 American Players Theatre opened its 2021 “season of hope” with a magnificent production of The Mountaintop in the Touchstone Theatre, with Lawrence and Thompson reprising their roles. Performing for a masked, socially distanced, and unusually small audience – roughly 25% of the theater’s capacity in accordance with Equity rules – the actors and production team truly breathed life into the text and transformed it into a stunning night of theater.

In less than two hours they reminded all of us what it was like to sit together in a darkened theater, experiencing something profound in a communal setting, laughing when we were amused, gasping when we were surprised, and clapping when we were grateful. Simply being part of a live theater event after 14 long months of isolation was a triumph. But watching this particular production was especially inspiring, as it immerses viewers in the social unrest, racial inequality, gun violence, and police brutality of the late 1960s. Then it all-too-easily morphs into a reckoning with our current crisis – including repeated references to the police shooting a young black man named Larry Payne at one of King’s marches – challenging viewers to consider how to move forward in 2021.

Helmed by Ron OJ Parson, a Chicago-based director who previously directed Blood Knot and Fences for APT, The Mountaintop is a story that balances precariously on the edge of historical reality and absolute fantasy. In the real-world camp, Jason Fassl’s set design for the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Dr. King spent his last night, is a near replica of the actual Room 306. From its pale pink bedspreads and curtains and the two tired beds pushed up against a large window, to the mud-colored shag carpeting and the hotel’s brightly lit sign just outside the door, it’s a vivid and literal snapshot of a moment in time.

Chroniclers of King’s last days tell us that there really was a thunderstorm howling that night, when the Civil Rights leader asked his friend Ralph Abernathy to get him some cigarettes. And he was consumed with thoughts of his own death. As alluded to in his famous speech in support of the sanitation workers’ strike, King openly acknowledged the possibility that he might be killed before his followers could “get to the promised land.” His furtive search for bugs in his hotel room furniture, and a telephone conversation with his wife, describing the latest threats of violence to his home and family, both square with history. Lawrence’s performance is certainly evocative of the charismatic leader, with his whisper of an accent, the musical cadence of his speech, and the deep resonance of a Baptist minister at the pulpit.

As the opinionated and sometimes profane hotel maid Camae, Thompson wears the starched white apron and nametag on her uniform dress of the time, but her role is all playwright Hall’s flight of fancy. Camae transforms steadily from the bouncy, new employee who brings a cup of coffee to room 306 to a woman who relentlessly vies for King’s attention – teasing him, plying him with cigarettes and even chiding him for his holey socks and “stinky feet.” For King she is a sweet temptation and a much-needed distraction – until she dons his coat and shoes, jumps up on one of the beds and gives her own passionate speech about race relations that ends with a vivid call for violence. Her final transformation is one that takes King and the audience by surprise. But once the shock wears off, we are all willing to go where she is leading. Clever lighting effects and ominous, looming shadows, once again by Jason Fassl, consistently add bits of magic to the fantastical side of the play.

There is also tension throughout the play between the larger-than-life persona of King as a modern-day messiah and martyr to the Civil Rights cause and his very human imperfections. Initially he is presented as tired – physically and spiritually – due to the slow progress of the Civil Rights cause in America. He is also frustrated with growing factions in his organization that criticize his speeches against the Vietnam War. Perhaps he did have (or would have had) dalliances with attractive women while he was on the road. Echoing the slogan of his marchers, King’s character protests plaintively, “I am a man!” at several points during the play, to right-size growing expectations of him. But it is hard not to see him also as a Christ-like figure in this play – when his last night on earth is framed so similarly to Jesus’s last night in the Garden of Gethsemane.

(Spoiler Alert: According to the Book of Luke, God sent an angel down for comfort when his disciples deserted him.)

Both Lawrence and Thompson are well matched and impressive, as they each charge at and retreat from one another, constantly switching tactics and tones. They are continually thrown off-balance by the unusual night and their need to complete missions that are at cross purposes before dawn. Thompson’s sweetness and charm covers ferocious rage one moment, strength and motherly comfort the next. Similarly, Lawrence is raring for a fight in one scene, ready to take on the world. Seconds later he is wistful for a former life when he could be anonymous, simply spending time with his family. His paranoia is well-earned, as is his longing for relief.

There are also moments of unexpected levity, including a pillow fight (?) and a few lines that seem cheesy rather than profound, which keep the audience a bit unbalanced as well. But when Camae grants Dr. King his wish to know what the future holds, the explosion of information and images that fills the stage is absolutely stunning. The exceptional video montage, created by Mike Tutaj, chronicles the half century of struggle for racial equality since Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. It is painful and revelatory and overwhelming, and the moment that tips the scales of the play to magical. Coupled with hearing Dr. King preaching directly to us to “pick up the baton,” the effect is breathtaking.

Due to COVID-19 capacity restrictions, tickets for The Mountaintop were extremely limited when they went on sale in April. Although the initial quantity sold out quickly, APT has added some extra seats for the rest of the run, through June 19. The theater will also make a recording of the production available online, for a fee. Whether you decide to see this exciting play in person, or from your living room, you should see it. After a very long quarantine, American Players Theatre is back, and truly better than ever.

Post Script

APT Opens its Season with a Stunning Journey to "The Mountaintop"