I spent Labor Day weekend at the annual Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, just across the Canadian border in Ontario, with members of a play-reading group organized by my friend Walter Uhrman. We left Friday and got back Monday.
As with the annual Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, the Shaw Festival consists of a repertory company putting on serious plays, but no longer limited to the plays of George Bernard Shaw and plays of the “Shaw era”.
The whole downtown of Niagara-on-the-Lake is devoted to shops, restaurants and hotels serving tourists, and, for many blocks around, all the homes are bed-and-breakfasts serving tourists. They are beautiful homes with beautiful gardens, and are no doubt big money-makers for their owners, but the money spent is worth it.
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The most memorable play I saw was The Mountaintop, which depicted the last night of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, before he was murdered by a white man. The title is taken from his last speech, in which he said that he, like Moses, was not privileged to enter into the Promised Land, but saw what it was like from a mountaintop.
He was in Memphis to support a strike of sanitation workers, whose slogan was, “I am a man.” This is the theme of the play, that Martin Luther King was a man in a double meaning of that word—that he was a man, a person of dignity and worth, entitled to equal rights, but also that he was a man, subject to the human weaknesses to which all men are subject.
The play lasts for an hour and 40 minutes, and the play’s only two actors were on stage all that time—one playing Dr. King, the other playing Camae, an earthy hotel maid. About 30 or so minutes of the play is devoted to the interplay of King and Camae. In one part, she gets up on the bed and delivers her own parody civil rights speech.
Then it develops that she knows more about King than a stranger could know. He suspects her of being an FBI agent, sent to entrap him into actions for which he could be blackmailed or discredited. But the truth is stranger than that.
Camae is an angel (like Clarence in “It’s a Wonderful Life”), sent to help prepare him for his coming death.
King doesn’t want to die. He has plans he wants to accomplish. In one scene, Camae arranges for him to make a long-distance telephone call to God.
“Hello, God?”
“You sound different from what I expected.”
“You sound like my grandmother.”
“I loved my grandmother.”
“Of course I love You more.”
He tells God how much he loves Him and has tried to do His will. Then he slips into complaining about how unfair it is that he will not be allowed to complete his work. Finally he reports with surprise that God hung up on him.
King is shown going through the stages of grief—denial, bargaining, anger, despair and acceptance. Near the end of the play there is a photo montage showing events related to civil rights decade-by-decade after his death. Wisely, there is no statement as to whether this represents a Promised Land or not.
The play strikes a difficult balance between comedy, tragedy and preaching, and avoids slipping into either silliness or offensiveness, which would have been easy to do. This is due not only to the strong script written by Katori Hall, who as a girl lived in Memphis at the time Dr.King was shot. It is also due to the strong performances by Kevin Hanchard and Alana Hibbert.
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