Theater review: MLK’s perilous ascent to ‘The Mountaintop’

Bottom line: Imperfect yet essential.

Even in the best of circumstances, even as a Broadway production with Hollywood stars, Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop” can be difficult to negotiate.

A fictional description of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last night on earth, the play imagines the civil rights leader as a weary solider, craving Pall Mall cigarettes and caffeine, his voice fraught with fatigue. When a hotel maid brings him coffee, what looks like an erotically tinged realist drama turns into a supernatural suspense story that finds the icon wrestling with angels and contemplating his place in the continuum of history and immortality.

Atlanta director Kenny Leon staged the Olivier Award winner on Broadway with Samuel L. Jackson in the role of King and Angela Bassett as the innocently omniscient maid, Camae. Now, director Jasmine Guy and actors Danny Johnson and Demetria McKinney give King’s hometown audiences their first post-Broadway viewing of the drama. It’s a safe, frustratingly static crowd pleaser that mostly underscores the inherent flaws of Hall’s uneven play before turning on a final virtuosic stroke that redeems the whole matter.

Like Christ, “Preacher King,” as Camae calls him, died that others might be free. And like Christ, King has an eleventh-hour conversation with the Lord that illumines his doubts and uncertainty. “The Mountaintop” is a Last Supper of coffee and cigarettes, wherein a moral giant reveals his flaws and temptations and ponders who will succeed him in the struggle. It’s a mesmerizing idea of a play. Yet it never flexes much intellectual muscle.

Speaking in a rich, sonorous voice that dances with music, irony and the inflections of a person of King’s class and social standing, Johnson’s MLK is eloquent and human. (Johnson seems to wear the part more naturally than his famous forbear, Jackson.) Camae, by contrast, is jittery, starstruck and coarse of tongue. Her embarrassment at spewing profanity in front of her distinguished host is funny at first, but the joke stretches thin. McKinney is no Angela Bassett; she swallows her words and seems to lack stage experience. But she is a very pretty, sometimes sparkling presence.

Set designer Kat Conley puts the action on a stage that is slightly skewed and seems to fill up the auditorium-like Southwest Arts Center. Her Lorraine Motel room is period perfect and appropriately dismal. Jonida Beqo’s costumes — a suit for King and a uniform for Camae — serve the story without distracting from it. Bobby Johnston delivers a lovely and reflective aural backdrop, although it’s a little clunky that the sound of raindrops goes away when the room door shuts. The hand of God seems to be operating the dimmer switch for lighting designer Andre C. Allen, whose shading of key moments isn’t always subtle. Allen’s video projections are also somewhat cluttered and too briskly paced to absorb.

I’ve climbed “The Mountaintop” twice now, and I can’t say it gets easier. But after the jagged edges and rough patches, the view from the summit is pretty magnificient.