Theatre Charlotte rises to 'The Mountaintop'
“The Mountaintop” runs through Feb. 25 at Theatre Charlotte, 501 Queens Road
This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on February 17, 2024. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. And check out this link for Toppman’s archive of reviews in the Ledger.
Review: ‘The Mountaintop’ brings its audience into the Lorraine Motel for Martin Luther King Jr.’s final night
Justin Peoples (left) has the spellbinding cadence of a classic preacher as he plays Martin Luther King Jr., and LeShea Stukes plays Camae, who is working her first night at the Lorraine Motel. (Photo by Kyle J. Britt)
by Lawrence Toppman
I had seen “The Mountaintop” twice before, but I had never been inside the play until Friday night at Theatre Charlotte. Scenic designer Chris Timmons (the company’s artistic director) has transformed the lobby into room 306 of the slightly shabby Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. took a fatal bullet 56 years ago.
The five dozen people in the audience sit on hard chairs atop low metal risers, a few feet from the actors. Sometimes I felt like a ghost, silently revisiting that death-haunted site. Sometimes I felt like a juror weighing the civil rights leader’s strengths and weaknesses on the last night of his life. When King swung into full-bore preacher mode, he might have been preaching to me across the decades.
The play, which runs for 90 intermission-less minutes, has always had the quality Latinx writers call “magic realism.” A maid named Camae (LeShea Stukes), working her first night at the Lorraine, brings him a cup of coffee and never leaves the room again. King (Justin Peoples) sends unseen Ralph Abernathy to a corner store for cigarettes, but Abernathy never returns.
The magical angle of Katori Hall’s script has to be fudged at Theatre Charlotte. Both Penumbra Theatre’s 2014 touring production at Booth Playhouse and a later one at Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte pulled off special effects that can’t be replicated in this lobby. But in every other way, the intimacy of the production works in its favor. When Camae talks about the holes in the socks on King’s stinky feet, we see and almost smell his footwear.
Director Corlis Hayes doesn’t reduce the dramatic weight of the play: We still feel King’s fear, weariness and desperation at America’s failure to hear his message. Yet Hayes brings out the funny side, from Camae’s easygoing deflection of King’s flirting to his chat with an unheard God. (King’s side of that conversation sounds like an uptempo Bob Newhart routine.)
On my third go-round, I picked up details I hadn’t thought about before: I’d guess “Camae” to be a version of “karma,” and an early reference she makes to a hooker using Room 306 the night before has a payoff I had previously missed.
Perhaps the close-up dialogue revealed more of the play to me. Stukes has waited 10 years to play this part — she understudied the role in the Penumbra version — and she makes every moment count, from sassy repartee to tender consolation to a fiery sermon of her own.
Peoples doesn’t imitate King’s voice, but his long monologue about passing the civil rights baton from generation to generation has the spellbinding cadence and fervor of a classic preacher. (Extra credit here to dramaturg and acting coach Mack Staton and vocal coach Marilyn Carter.) Listening to Peoples speak Hall’s words, we’re reminded how much King accomplished in just 39 years — and how badly we miss him now, in an America as bitterly divided as his own.
➡️ If You’re Going: “The Mountaintop” runs through Feb. 25 at Theatre Charlotte, 501 Queens Road. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; the Sunday shows have sold out.
Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews about two times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
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