A weary business traveler checks into a dreary hotel room. He goes to the bathroom to relieve himself, takes off his shoes, and recoils from the smell of his feet, which have been sweating in his socks all day. He attempts to rehearse the next day’s presentation, but he cannot focus. He craves stimulation—having exhausted his supply of cigarettes, he orders a cup of coffee from room service, and finds the stimulation he was seeking in the sexy hotel maid dispatched to deliver it. Thus might have begun any number of plays about any number of distillates of Willy Loman or Shelley “The Machine” Levine. But our business traveler is the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the hotel room is in Memphis, and the date is April 3, 1968, the last night of his life. The play is Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop, four-fifths of which is a very good work of drama. The remaining fifth is a cringe-inducing camp meeting of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
The Mountaintopis a two-man show. Dramatically, that is a difficult thing to carry off—more difficult, arguably, than the one-man show. A one-man show has a single point of focus, which concentrates both the dramatic energy of the proceedings and the audience’s attention on precisely the same locus. The two-man show relies on the sense of balance and timing, usually referred to as “chemistry,” which is a product of both actors’ skills but wholly within the control of neither. Casting is a