Arden’s “Mountaintop” visits MLK Jr. on last night of his life

It’s a small thing, really, but details matter.

Just minutes after “The Mountaintop” begins, Akeem Davis, playing a bone-weary Martin Luther King Jr. turning in for the night, heads for the bathroom in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

It’s the night before his assassination, but that’s hours ahead.

Meanwhile, though, there’s the sound of a man doing his business, then the sound of a toilet flushing. But the audience never hears water running in the sink. MLK Jr., one of our nation’s most esteemed civil rights leaders, didn’t wash his hands.

“We talked about that for an hour. You obsess,” said Davis, describing the rehearsal process for the Arden Theatre Company production of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Katori Hall’s work. The show runs through Dec. 14.

In “The Mountaintop,” on the last night of his life, King is yearning for some rest, some inspiration, and a few Pall Mall cigarettes, when he receives a mysterious visitor in the guise of a motel maid, sassily played by Kishia Nixon. She brings coffee, a flask of whiskey, and raises questions, both for King and for the audience.

Questions of legacy. Questions of humanity. Questions of ambition and of human frailty. Is King really as perfect as history paints him? Or even more so?

Of course, a play isn’t a question-and-answer session, with multiple choices. A story needs to unfold, detail by detail. And so, in this play, the toilet flushes and …

Davis describes that moment as an attempt, early in the play, “to pull King off his perfect pedestal in small, little ways, to show him as ‘a normal every-day citizen,’ ” full of flaws, yet full of greatness.

“I can’t say it bugged me because I’m always about not the ‘what,’ but the ‘why,’” Davis said. “It would have bugged me if I thought it was egregious. But, whether she did it on purpose or not, it plays well to the troubling of his perfect persona.”

A few days after the opening, Davis said he noticed that the prop designer left a towel near the bathroom door, so he started wiping his hands in that scene. “You look for little things to keep your imagination buzzing.”

At first, Hall’s play couldn’t get any traction in the U.S. Only after it sold out in London in 2009 did American theaters sign on. Opening on Broadway in 2011, with Samuel L. Jackson as King and Angela Bassett as the maid, it immediately sparked controversy over its depiction of King.

Would audiences appreciate anything other than complete sainthood from a man held in the highest esteem, someone akin to Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama, two examples that Davis gave?

“I’m uninterested in the notion of a perfect person because I can’t relate to a perfect person,” Davis said. “I love to read about the fallible parts of great people because I want to know what their weaknesses were and what they did to overcome them.”

Davis said he is interested in the “tension in their lives between the public and private personas of successful people. This play does the work that this man was not perfect, but look at how great he actually is, because his heart was that big.”

All of those tensions are evident in “The Mountaintop.”

There’s ambition and King’s mixture of pride and belief that only he has the ability to lead the movement. What will be his legacy? There’s a man who loves his wife and children, but doesn’t mind a little love on the side. He’s a preacher, but curses like a sailor and enjoys his whiskey.

King’s actions, leadership and inspiration are important — for the trash collectors on strike in Memphis and for people everywhere struggling for their civil rights. He knows that, yet, honestly, he’s just so tired.

“He didn’t want his infidelity to become something that tortured his family, that risked the credibility of his own faith walk, which was the foundation of the credibility of the civil rights movement,” Davis said. “He was making himself susceptible to ruining the things that meant the most to him.

“MLK gets celebrated and Malcolm X was denigrated because Malcolm X presented in a more threatening way,” Davis said. “There’s always a reckoning in how Black folks get spoken about.

“When you get MLK Jr., you get a man who was the perfect radical. He believed in civil disobedience. He lived the creed of civil disobedience, but he did it aligned with conservative Christian views, demanding that America live up to the ideals that it was founded upon.

“When you get to a status like that, you want to protect it. He paid for it. He was all about ‘Love thy neighbor’ and nonviolence, yet they put a bullet in his neck.”

Road trip

Shortly before rehearsals began, Davis and his family took a road trip to Memphis to see the Lorraine Motel.

“It took me going to the place to appreciate that MLK got arrested more than anyone you know. He got attacked and accosted more than anyone you know,” Davis said. “There’s the neutered idea of nonviolence — soft, safe, saintly. And he was not. He was a radical by definition and he troubled the waters by definition.”

But in “The Mountaintop,” on his final night in the Lorraine Motel, King was just plain-old tired, with stinky feet, and feeling more than a little grumpy.

The very first moments of the play are in the dark. With his back to the audience, King/Davis opens his motel room door onto the balcony and shouts for his friend, civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy,  to bring him some cigarettes.

For Davis, it’s a moment to recalibrate. Instead of performing with 400 audience eyes on him, Davis draws them into King’s world. “It’s super-relaxing to start a show that feels like I’m winding down instead of ramping up,” Davis said.

Some things to notice:

Listen for the difference between Davis speaking as a regular man and Davis speaking in the preacherly voice we’ve all come to recognize as Dr. King’s. Hall differentiates the two voices in the script. When Davis is supposed to sound like the public preacher, the script reads: King (King Voice).

Pay attention to the phone call that King has with God.

“Phone conversations are an incredible task,” Davis said. “The conversation with God is nearly two pages long and is different from a monologue or a soliloquy. In a monologue you are speaking to someone, but in soliloquy you are out to talk to the universe.”

“But there is no one on the other line. I’m just holding a prop phone,” he said.

During rehearsals, he and director Brett Ashley Robinson began to write what God might be saying on His (or Her) end. “You have to crystallize what you hear so you can respond,” he said. “I wrote a few notes in between the text to indicate that God is speaking … ellipses here and a dash there.

“God is a bit tricky. God is a bit strict, but also is fun in ways. That’s a bit of the lesson that Martin gets in this play. You take yourself too seriously.”

But Davis did take playing the role seriously, excited, but not overwhelmed by the fame of his character. “You’re asking a mountain climber what he thinks about Everest,” Davis laughed. “Let me at it.”

FYI

“The Mountaintop, through Dec. 14, Arden Theatre Co., 40 N. 2d St., Phila. 215-922-1122. Playing Dec. 3 through Jan. 25, “A Wrinkle in Time” from Arden’s Children’s Theatre.

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