LEGACY MEETS MORTALITY IN THE MOUNTAINTOP

This superb production of Katori Hall‘s The Mountaintop, a surprise-filled two-hander depicting King’s last night before his assassination, is not just history. Director Maurice Emmanuel Parent works with two excellent actors—Dominic Carter and Kiera Prusmack—to lead us to understand that King’s concerns and work are still relevant. It’s at the point when Martin Luther King, Jr. checks the phone in his motel room for listening devices that it becomes clear: the civil liberties being eroded today didn’t even exist for large segments of the population before King reluctantly accepted the responsibility for leadership thrust upon him.

The play opens on the night of April 3, 1968. At this point, King has been threatened and harassed by the FBI and attacked and assaulted by white racists. King has come to Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, and earlier that day, he gave a seemingly prophetic speech in which he said he was not afraid to die because “he’d been to the mountaintop” and he had seen that “we as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”

King is exhausted and discouraged when he gets to his motel room. An effort to organize a nonviolent protest the week before had ended in riots and looting. His room service request for a cup of coffee is delivered by Camae, a new employee, pretty and transgressive. Camae challenges King. She questions his nonviolent tactics and points out his shortcomings. She also shocks and titillates King by smoking, tossing off profanities, and producing a flask of whiskey from the pocket of her apron. She’s flirtatious, and King is in need of comfort.

Just when we think we know where this story is going, it shifts gears and takes us in a completely different direction. Camae is not who King thinks she is, neither an ordinary motel employee nor an FBI informant, but an angel sent to aid his transition to the afterlife. Once he understands that time is running out, the formerly discouraged King pleads for more time. He describes his unfinished work, his vision for the next steps for the movement. Camae is moved by his arguments, but in the end, neither one of them can change what is going to happen, and King comes to terms with his own mortality and the need to trust others to carry on his work.

In the final moments, Camae delivers a monologue set against a rapid montage of people, movements, and events from 1968 to 2024 (Pamela Hersch, projections). It leads into King’s impassioned call for future generations to “pick up the baton” in the long relay to end racism, war, and poverty—cut short by the shock of the assassin’s bullet, and darkness.”

When the lights come up, Carter is visibly spent and perspiring from the demands of the role—a glimpse of what King himself endured as he led the fight against centuries of injustice, and a reminder of what it truly means to give one’s life to a cause.

photos by Benjamin Rose Photography

The Mountaintop
Front Porch Arts Collective
Suffolk University’s The Modern Theatre, 525 Washington St in Boston
Thurs & Fri at 7:30; Sat at 2 & 7:30; Sun at 2
ends on October 12, 2025
for tickets ($17.45 to $58.78; fees included), visit Ovation Tix

for more shows, visit Theatre in Boston