For all Martin Luther King, Jr. articles, please go to:
Belief with Wings
I Have a Nightmare
Virtual Deity
Crowd Pleaser
Stone Cold
A line from Angels in America would fit perfectly into Katori Hall’s Martin Luther King Jr. biography The Mountaintop, now on Broadway. In Angels, Tony Kushner’s deus ex machina proclaimed: “American prophet, tonight you become American eye that pierceth dark, American heart hot full for truth.”
Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Basset in The Mountaintop
As the principal figure of the American mid-20th century Civil Rights Movement, King’s myth makes him a prophet for the ideals and promises that America holds, yet troublingly withholds from its citizens. Hall dramatizes King as a weary, doomed, all-too-human political leader and insists on both the mortal and immortal sides of his legacy.
The Mountaintop shows King (played by Samuel L. Jackson) in his final moment of despair on April 3, 1968, in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the night before he was assassinated there. Jackson portrays a man facing his doubts and fears. “Fear is my companion,” he tells the chattering motel maid who delivers to him coffee, cigarettes and a little flirtation. The maid, Camae (Angela Bassett), is both a reminder of the commonweal and of his impending mortality.
Now that the theater press has held forth, mostly negatively, on The Mountaintop, it won’t spoil the play to admit its metaphysical aspects. This is necessary in order to understand Hall’s daring. She connects conventional wisdom about King as a liberal monument to both posthumous skepticism and the broad vision of Kushner’s 1990s landmark (“A Gay Fantasia on National Themes”), which supposedly enlightened modern American theater.
Hall follows Kushner’s quasi-theological, quasi-philosophical dramaturgy. The Mountaintop applies Kushner’s unexpected combination of religion and politics to a black American subject. Critics who don’t recognize this mix of down-home dialectic and political aspiration as an authentic Southern fusion—perfectly befitting a subject like King and the import of the Civil Rights Movement—reveal a hardened secularization of contemporary culture. They also reveal how hollow most King celebrations have become.
The Mountaintop’s suggestion of King’s spiritual life balances myth with recent feet-of-clay revisionism. This King drinks, smokes, cusses and has a libido to which Camae appeals (“You smoke to feel sexy”). Hall’s vernacular makes the interaction between King and Camae an enjoyable contrivance, reaching a peak when Camae shows King (to whom she refers in Southern dialect as “Doctuh Kang”) her own oratory gifts. She gets carried away by the anger that King always suppressed, yet he recognizes its truth—especially through Camae’s hilarious vulgarity. This common touch keeps the play companionable, even though it prevents critics from using it as a platform for their own condescending self-righteousness.
The middle class likes to hold historical figures to their own measure—it’s a form of gatekeeping (which may relate to why the King memorial in D.C. oddly suggests egress more than progress). Critics who don’t accept Hall’s concept also seem resistant to the ways black people may differently perceive politics, society and heroism. The Mountaintop is at its best anti-elitist, if not downright populist.
This entreaty begins with casting movie stars Jackson and Bassett. Those gospel preacher rhythms and sacrilegious tones that Jackson disgraced in his Pulp Fiction hitman’s oration get turned around and redeemed by his mellow performance. Against the odds, SamJack disappears and Jackson, the serious actor who plied his craft at the now forgotten but legendary Negro Ensemble Company, proves subtler and more humane than ever.
Responding to the challenge of portraying King, Jackson plays out the complex re-evaluation of history and self that are part of the current King rethink. Trashy as Jackson’s film career has been (Snakes on a Plane and Black Snake Moan—his snake diptych), he finds the unsalacious essence in Hall’s demystifying characterization. And Bassett’s archetypal Woman/Sister/Angel matches him.
Avoiding false piety, Hall’s humor and drama attempt revelation, prophecy, dream and hallucination. Director Kenny Leon rises above his usual mundane approach, starting with a Public Enemy-style aural montage and climaxing with a tour de force visual montage, pouring forth the cornucopia of cultural moments that the Civil Rights Movement made possible.
Hall’s theatrical rhetoric should have made its Angels connection axiomatic. Kushner’s line “An angel is a belief with wings and arms that can carry you. It’s not to be afraid of, and if it can’t hold you up, seek for something new” gives a fitting context for King’s gospel-inspired pragmatism. The Mountaintop’s two-sided vision of glory (“You won’t feel the hurt, the world will”) equals anything Kushner wrote. It calls for a devout audience.
