Patricia Cerra and Ray Strachan in The Mountaintop, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

A road-weary man with a cough and holes in his socks arrives back in an undistinguished Memphis motel on a stormy night in April 1968, dying for a cigarette and checking for hidden microphones before he phones his wife. His sonorous voice shows signs of wear-and-tear.

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“America, you are too arrogant…”

In The Mountaintop by the American playwright Katori Hall, Dr. Martin Luther King (Ray Strachan) is just back from delivering his “I have been to the mountaintop” speech, one of the 20th century’s most illustrious, at the Mason Temple in support of striking sanitation workers. And, all alone, he’s rehearsing some possible openers for speeches yet to come.

The play imagines the last night in the life of a hero, larger than life,, and tries to find his human size — with the vanity, exasperation, doubt, discouragement, and fear that implies. He jumps at every crack of thunder. The next day, April 4, will be a defining moment in the violent history of a nation and of the civil rights movement: King will be assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

And as he waits for his friend and roommate Ralph Abernathy to return with cigarettes, a motel housekeeper, Camae (Patricia Cerra), arrives at the door of room 306, with coffee, an early edition of tomorrow’s paper, and a mysterious supply of confidence, sass and skepticism.

Cerra’s performance charts a certain surprising — to us and to King — combination of the flirtatious and the fierce. The tired hero with the wandering eye and the smelly feet is intrigued enough to engage with Camae on a variety of subjects including race relations, violence, his own profile, gender inequality, leadership, martyrdom, even theology. Dr. King heaps his coffee with sugar. Camae likes hers “black and bitter.”

Who is she anyhow? The question that starts in playful teasing badinage that goes on way too long in The Mountaintop, takes a magical realism turn-around en route to the top of the mountain. And it’s major theatrical cardio. I can’t really say more except that I have my doubts about it. And I can tell you it relies on the powers of persuasion built into Cerra’s performance.

Patricia Cerra and Ray Strachan in The Mountaintop, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Under Darbasie’s direction, the characters have their own contrasting rhetorical styles; both, in their own way, incantatory. King’s is, of course, a matter of historical record. And it’s captured expertly by Strachan who has a long history with the role in many productions. He slides into a kind of oratorical from-the-pulpit grandiloquence with its own built-in pauses.  Camae’s style, in Cerra’s performance, has a slightly mocking, worldly, amused tone, a kind of faux languor designed to stir it up, and get a reaction.

The Citadel production that opened Thursday  (on the 56th anniversary of the fateful day at the Lorraine Motel) is a curious choice at Edmonton’s largest playhouse. The two-hander has the same director (Patricia Darbasie) and cast as Shadow Theatre’s 2022 production.

Which is not to say, of course, that the exhortations of Dr. King about racial inequality an violence have miraculously lost their relevance in the intervening two years (or the half-century-plus since the terrible history-defining events of 1968 in Memphis). Au contraire. Or that the performances from Strachan and Cerra (who were also in a 2019 Rosebud Theatre production) are anything less than polished, vivid, and committed.

But this is the question: is bigger better. For me, on this second viewing (I was kindly allowed to attend the final preview performance), the play itself — which premiered across the Atlantic in 2009 in a small London theatre, oddly enough, before it ever got to Broadway with a starry cast, Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett — seems thinner and more theatrically gimmicky this time. Delayed surprise, which holds The Mountaintop together, can overstay its welcome, I guess, even in a “bigger” production.

I ended up wondering, too, whether this more fulsome staging, with a design by John C. Dinning and lighting by Jeff Osterlin, ends up inflating a little play with a cool idea beyond its natural capacity.

Ray Strachan and Patricia Darbasie in The Mountaintop, Citadel Theatre. Photo by Nanc Price

Anyhow, Room 306 doesn’t really fall into the depressing motel category the script conjures. It’s a large, clean, well-lighted place that’s more like basic, mid-range Holiday Inn. The stormy sky and the strikingly abstract archway in which pages of speeches, and newspapers, and fliers seem to float down from above, lighted like lanterns. It’s a beautiful theatrical image.  And a prosaic place where heroes on the road stay seems suspended in space, in a star-filled galaxy.

The Promised Land, the future that Dr. King envisaged, not only hasn’t been reached but might actually be getting blurrier, receding into the distance as the news attests — white supremacist take-overs, George Floyd, Republic efforts to disenfranchise Black voters … the list is long. The final vision of the play, and the exhortation to “pass the baton” (accompanied by Amelia Scott’s assorted projections) has been updated for our moment in time. But the sense that the world is stalled doesn’t detract from the power of King’s great and visionary speech, resonating with hope and laced with intimations of mortality, that anchors this odd play. It intensifies our sense of tragedy.

REVIEW

The Mountaintop

Theatre: Citadel

Written by: Katori Hall

Directed by: Patricia Darbasie

Starring: Patricia Cerra, Ray Strachan

Running: through April 21

Tickets: 780-425-1820, citadeltheatre.com