DEL.ICIO.USKing impersonator says it takes more than acting skills
Jim Lucas has a one-man show, play
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Every winter, Jim Lucas goes to his barber and tells him, “Give me the Martin cut.”
The barber knows just what he means: It’s showtime.
Jason Getz/jgetz@ajc.com
This time of year, Lucas gets numerous bookings for his one-man show and for a play, ‘The Meeting,’ which imagines an encounter between King and Malcolm X.
Jason Getz/jgetz@ajc.com
Actor Jim Lucas, a Martin Luther King, Jr. impersonator, performs at the Natalie and Lansing B. Lee Jr. Auditorium at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta Friday.
Lucas, a veteran of stage and TV, is one of a few actors who specializes in portraying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Other American icons have attracted dozens of impersonators. The Association of Lincoln Presenters counts more than 160 “living Lincolns” in its Abe Directory, and Lord only knows how many Elvi walk the land. But King is another matter.
“A lot of people recite the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech,” says Steve Klein, a spokesman for the King Center, but he didn’t know of many full-fledged MLK presenters. He isn’t sure, in fact, whether there might be intellectual property issues involved.
This time of year, Lucas gets numerous bookings for his one-man show and for a play, “The Meeting,” which imagines an encounter between King and Malcolm X. Though he has performed the role more than 200 times across the nation and abroad, he has never played Atlanta. The closest he has come this year was a King commemoration Friday at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.
The auditorium was packed with curious staff and students from the medical school and two nearby institutions, Paine College and Augusta State University. A little after noon, Lucas strode onto the stage in his black preacher suit and skinny tie and started a compressed, 24-minute version of the show — less than half its usual length — interspersing third-person narration with recitations from King’s most famous speeches.
‘It takes something more’
At 60, the actor is more than 20 years older than King was at death. At “5-foot-12,” as he jokes, he’s about 5 inches taller. But he has the same soft facial features and the same stately baritone, and as he launched into the “Dream” sequence, inhabiting King’s gestures down to the way he shook his head to emphasize a point, the performance easily passed the “amen” test. The audience, knowing its part from the familiar black-and-white footage, couldn’t help but interject “Amen!” and “That’s right!” at the proper places.
When it was over, people rose and gave Lucas a standing ovation.
“That was dead-on,” said Augusta State sophomore Brandon Whitaker. “I think that’s the closest to Dr. King you can get.”
In the beginning, Lucas says, he wasn’t sure he wanted to play America’s greatest civil rights leader.
A native of Lake Providence, La., Lucas participated in demonstrations as a high school student and remembers tearing up as he watched the “I Have a Dream” speech on TV as a teenager. He went on to Southern University and took a job with the U.S. Agriculture Department, but he was always interested in acting and started pursuing it mid-career.
In 1983, Lucas attended the 20th anniversary celebration of the March on Washington and conceived the idea of reciting the “Dream” speech at schools and churches. But when friends suggested he take the role further, he resisted. The thought of playing King was intimidating.
“This is a very difficult part,” he says. “Not the technical aspect. I’m an actor, and if you ask me to play a mule, I’ll be a mule. But this is King. It takes something more.”
Seeing a ‘reincarnation’
Lucas began performing as King regularly in the late 1980s. He has never made a full-time living from it — he won’t disclose his fee — but it has colored the rest of his acting. He has appeared in numerous theatrical productions in Washington, where he lived before moving to be close to his wife’s family in eastern North Carolina, and has had parts in several movies and TV shows, including “24,” “The West Wing” and “The Wire.”
“I’ve played a Secret Service agent and a judge and an aide to the mayor,” he says, “but I’ll never play a murderer or a rapist or a drug dealer. I don’t think I could do King one day and do one of those the next.”
While Lucas is far from a dead ringer for King, he does manage to turn heads.
Once, after a show in Memphis, he visited the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated. Lucas had not had time to change out of his preacher suit. As he walked around the exhibitions, he noticed that Japanese tourists were following him taking pictures.
Some audience members had the same reaction in Augusta.
Nadine Hammonds, a recent Augusta State graduate, approached Lucas after the performance with a glow of holy wonder in her eyes.
“The whole time you were speaking,” she told him, “I saw a reincarnation. Bless you.”
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