Room-service spirit guide for the gentleman rogue in Room 306

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This article was published 16/02/2024 (956 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The sanitation workers are striking and so is the lightning as Martin Luther King Jr. (Ray Strachan) slogs through the downpour to his room at the Lorraine Motel, soaking up the electric blue of another lonesome night spent in Memphis diagnosing the malady of the American spirit.

It’s April 1968. He’s stayed here often, but this time, King struggles to open the door, fiddling with the knob as if it were a foreign object. A man defined by the appearance of grace, on this night, the reverend from Atlanta is consumed by nerves, the word of God vibrating in his heart after delivering his I’ve Been to the Mountaintop speech.

He knows what’s coming, but that doesn’t make him any less afraid.

Here is a man whose public persona is so well-documented — by the press, by his disciples, by his detractors, by the FBI — that any semblance of a private life has all but been eliminated. But in the first few minutes of Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop, directed at Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s John Hirsch Theatre by Hazel Venzon, we hear King rehashing his latest speech while urinating in the ensuite: he is but a man.

In King’s autobiography, published posthumously, he quotes Goethe: “There’s enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue.”

That duality is the key to The Mountaintop, which explores, through magical realism and biblical imagery, the chasm between dreams and reality, between fearful hope and hopeless fear, between impossible godliness and universal mortality.

The production is essentially set completely within Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, an establishment that, without a hail of bullets yet to come, would likely be forgotten by history.

Designed by Brian Perchaluk, it’s an average room, its walls stained by its visitors’ reliance on the standing ashtray. The carpet is muddied. The bathroom is small. It’s hardly fit for a king.

In the quiet of that room, King’s paranoia runs amok: he searches for listening devices — suspicious that someone other than the Almighty is hearing what he’s saying.

Craving a drag from a Pall Mall to calm his nerves, King sends his man out to get a pack. While he’s waiting, a hotel maid (Cherissa Richards) arrives with a cup of coffee, sheltering herself from the rain with tomorrow’s paper, an element of winking prognostication.

Once Camae struts into the room, the gentleman gives way to a rogue. Leaning his entire body, King ogles Camae, his hangdog expression replaced with the unmistakable gleam of desire.

Camae, played with smoke and fire by Richards, is temptation incarnate, a mirror held up to reveal the married King’s mortal, immoral, gaze.

“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” Camae says, popping a cigarette out from the pack and quoting the Gospel of Matthew.

Strachan and Richards, the only two performers in the 90-minute production (no intermission), are terrific alone, but wonderful together, building a gradual physical chemistry as their characters’ conversation deepens.

Strachan revels in vocal code-switching, shifting his character’s voice to serve different purposes. On the phone with well-wishers and with holier company, his tendency is toward the timbre of sermonizing — the voice we hear when we think of Martin Luther King. Other times, he allows his character’s anxiety to bubble to the surface.

Richards does a more physical shift, using her height to provide the shorter Strachan with a companion unafraid of challenging King’s views or providing a vessel of comfort for a broken man looking to rest in her lap — a Tennessean La Pieta.

Camae boldly calls out King when his holier-than-thou tendencies emerge. In one standout scene, she imagines what she’d say if she were in his position, donning his sport coat and dress shoes and screaming “F—- the white man.”

“I think that’ll be the title for my next sermon,” says King, who doesn’t disagree with Camae but knows he can never say such a thing out loud.

Camae is the propellant for the story, a fact made apparent in the way she lights every cigarette smoked, a moment repeatedly punctuated with a bath of orange light. At various points, the lighting changes are accompanied by fiery projections, which are jarring but not ineffective.

Biblical undertones are everywhere, as the heavenly Camae helps King deal with the gradual realization that, like Moses, he won’t ever see the Promised Land. Through more effective video projections, designed by Hugh Conacher, Camae also gives him a glimpse beyond his own finality — a powerful moment allowing Strachan to show his character’s emotional arc, with Venzon casting King as a silhouette in front of a backdrop of progress.

Of course, for King, death comes, a moment handled with sincerity and gravity, with Strachan ascending a spiralling staircase to deliver one final sermon against a shimmering wall spangled with stars.

We are so close, but we are still so far away.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com