The playbill only listed two actors. One was portraying Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The other was a woman. The set was clearly designed to look like the infamous room 306 at the Lorraine Motel. The story starts with King returning to the room after dark alone in the pouring rain. He calls for a cup of coffee from Room Service and awaiting the return of Ralph Abernathy from a errand looking for smokes--Pall Mall's to be specific. Soon a young woman arrives with the room service. She first comes off as a bit of groupie. She has cigarettes and the two flirt and smoke and drink a little whiskey that she has tucked away in a flask in her apron. It's all about the humanity of King.
As time goes by, the attitude of the young woman changes. She's asking more probing questions, and King is suspicious at one point accusing her of being an FBI informant...he's soon to wish that were. She is, in fact, an angel come to preparing him for his death. This is not something King is ready to hear, and he argues for his life even to the point of a phone call with God, but even She won't change her mind. King asks to see the future and the Angel put him in a trance than performs a sort of "We Didn't Start the Fire" rap of next 45 years...convenient stopping in the present moment.
While she does this, the back wall of the motel room splints in two and slides away into the side stages to reveal an enormous orb. And here's the only glitch in the whole production--apparently the orb was meant to reflect the surface of the moon; however, it projected a Message that read: "EPSON: systems you can count on". The words disappeared. Then reappeared. Then disappeared. Then the orb became the moon. All the while the Angel was rapping away, oblivious to the glitch. Which given the intensity of the performances was a real shitty thing to happen.
The angel leaves. King steps forward and delivers sections of his final speech--interestingly omitting the whole "I don't care what happens to me now" and "I have been to the Mountaintop" etc... The Angel reappears in a stunning white gown and beauty head gear reminiscent of something Guinan would don in Star Trek. She reaches out for King's hand and the two walk away toward the enormous moon and lights fade.
I was familiar with the work of Ro Boddie, who played King. Everything I've seen the man do is done with excellence. He has a face of similar structure to that of King and the make-up department capitalized on that to give us not only a wonderful performance, but a plausible likeness that just made the performance all that much more credible. The man who was listed as his understudy is another excellent actor, but his features are more angular, and his complexion paler--I tried to imagine him in the role, and though I know he would handle adeptly the performance, I was glad I was watching Boddie on stage this afternoon. The way the part is written, it was a tour de force of emotions and energy levels and sudden, unexpected turns. The man know how to play asthma/panic attack to an alarming degree.
His co-star on stage was the newly minted angel, Camea, played by Renea S. Brown. I saw her last summer in Folger Theatre's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; however, I didn't recall anything particular about her performance then. It was as if I was discovering her for the first time, and she was delightful in this role. Her transformation from silly young hotel employee to God's appointed messenger and travel agent for one of the greatest heroes of the Civil Rights movement in the 20th century was the perfect combination of simple-silly to powerful-compassionate. And most important off all was the chemistry between the two. It was an excellent example of two actors playing off of one another to close an trust gap in a story line that was fantastical, thus creating a path by which the audience had no trouble in suspending their otherwise reasonable disbelief.
A thought provoking play by one of the foremost awarded and recognized young African American playwrights working today, Katori Hall. With both a Pulitzer Prize and an Olivier Award under her belt, she was another reason for this play to make my autumn shortlist.
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