Play portrays MLK on his last night

Pacific Theatre show delivers portrait of an activist fighting enormous battles

At one point in The Mountaintop, Katori Hall's 2009 play about the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. on the night before his 1968 assassination, the mysterious motel maid Camae (Shayna Jones) says to King (Kwesi Ameyaw), “Tomorrow you'll be a saint.” Earlier she has told him, “You're just a man.”

This dramatic and often surprisingly funny two-hander attempts to make sense of a complicated character who lives somewhere between those two definitions. Just 90 minutes long, it can only begin to scratch the surface of the real Dr. King, who has become something of a myth. But director Omari Newton's tidy Pacific Theatre production succeeds in delivering a rounded portrait of a man fighting enormous battles on issues that continue to haunt American culture.

We first meet King alone in his drab Memphis motel room, desperately craving coffee and cigarettes, rehearsing a sermon on the theme “Why America is going to hell.” Ameyaw doesn't attempt to emulate King's hypnotic cadences. But even alone his King has an upstanding dignity. And he's clearly troubled.

Attendance is down at his rallies. He's juggling too many causes: His long-standing civil rights struggle against American racism, a Poor People's Campaign, the sanitation workers' strike that brought him to Memphis, opposition to the Vietnam War. His call for non-violence and love has found resistance among African-americans tired of being on the receiving end of white violence and increasingly attracted to the more militant strategies of the late Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party.

He finds a receptive audience for his anxieties in Camae, the young Black maid who delivers his coffee and shares her cigarettes with him. She has seen him on TV — “You're like the Beatles!” — but is hardly awestruck. She's flirty and self-confident, and he flirts back. Though his reputation as a serial adulterer precedes him, his politics interest her more. She challenges his Gandhian tactics. If we're going to march, she argues, let's march for ass-whipping.

About midway through the play comes a reveal that I will not give away. Suffice to say from that point on, King knows his death is imminent. Throughout the play a thunderstorm rages, and with each blast of thunder King panics. He has suffered so many death threats and close calls. He doesn't really need help to know that his time is drawing near. King finds his faith in God challenged in a quirky way as he insists he has too much work still to do to be taken now. But as Jones effects an impressive transformation of Camae's character, King realizes he has no choice. Hall's script follows with a montage of American history since 1968 that didn't really work for me despite Wladimiro A. Woyno Rodriguez's elaborate projections. The play ends with King's moving vision of the promised land he can see from the mountaintop, and his insistence on love as the only means to that end. The audible sobs from the audience attest to the ongoing power of his vision, the effectiveness of Ameyaw's straightforward, unadorned portrayal, and the loss we all suffered with King's awful death at the age of only 39.