Dr. Martin Luther King comes alive in ‘The Mountaintop’

In the opening moments of The Mountaintop, currently onstage at American Stage in St. Petersburg, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. enters his motel room and almost immediately searches under tables, chairs and countertops, and inside the telephone receiver, for listening devices. The civil rights leader is paranoid, and he has every right to be: It’s April, 1968, and he’s not terribly popular with white America.

He’s in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The audience knows he will be assassinated the following day, as he stands on the motel balcony.

Written by Katori Hall, The Mountaintop is an emotional roller coaster. A maid, Camae, arrives to deliver a cup of coffee King has requested. He bums a cigarette from her, and the two begin to talk. And talk.

And that’s The Mountaintop.

King smokes, and he drinks (a little), and he is not faithful to his wife back home. This is all in the historical record. Hall says she created a “warts and all” portrait of the American icon – his feet smell and there are holes in his socks – on purpose.

Kayland Jordan, who plays Camae, understands the playwright’s mission. “I think we have our minds made up about Dr. King,” she says, “and what’s beautiful about this play is that it humanizes him. We get to see him after work. He’s a household name who has the affection that a celebrity receives. But all that we got to see of him was very political. He was always being challenged in interviews.”

Her character encounters that very human part of Martin Luther King, a great man with the foibles of an average man. “Camae comes in, and we don’t know anything about her, but from the gate she is challenging him – but she’s enamored at the same time.”

Camae is smart, she’s confrontational, she’s flirtatious and she’s funny (she turns into “Florence from The Jeffersons” sassy when it suits her).

Brandon Burditt did not have the luxury of creating a character out of whole cloth. 

“I had to balance what’s recognizable about him and what the play reveals about him,” the actor says. “Some things, like the voice, people will know about, because he’s one of the greatest speakers ever. But he was also a performer – he put on the voice because that’s how he would preach.

“Relaxed, he wouldn’t actually speak like that. I know I have at least a hundred expectations of the King voice, like what he should be, while also remembering no, a big part of this play is seeing the King we never saw before. I think that makes him even more impressive.”

To wit, Burditt explains, “The fact that he needed to smoke, and he enjoyed the company of women, that never interfered, drastically, with his actual mission. Despite his regular-ness he still had the faith and the consistency to do everything that he tried to do.”

(Jordan, for her part, researched local Memphis accents from the period. The one she chose is thick and decidedly southern.)

Watching the two of them spar, discussing everything from their families to theology to whether King should shave off his moustache – is like watching a “float like a butterfly” boxing match. The audience is never sure who’s going to land the next punch.

“I think Katori wants people to walk away not thinking there’s a right answer or a right way to go about anything,” Jordan says. “This is a play where we’re constantly challenging the ideology of Malcom X versus Dr. King. It’s like, is there an in-between? It’s all about humanity, rather than ‘Is there a right way to go about civil rights?’”

Although both performers are from out of the area (Burditt hails from Washington State, while Jordan is a Texas native), they’ve each appeared at American Stage previously. He was in the cast of 2022’s The Colored Museum (helmed by Keith Arthur Bolden, director of The Mountaintop) and she was in The Figs (a world premiere) last July.

Performing a “two-hander,” with no other actors on the stage, is a particular challenge. Particularly something with such a powerful wallop.

“The beautiful part of that is you get to grow the relationship, organically, in the moment,” says Burditt. “You don’t have these hard-cuts and blackouts, and you have to come back five days later and catch it up. Everything you see happens in the moment.

“And there are some things that happen in the moment that surprise both of us. And actually performing it in front of an audience is really, really fun.”

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