In Memphis, God's Will Comes Knocking
The Front Porch Arts Collective's "The Mountaintop" at Suffolk University's Modern Theatre
“Greetings, Prophet! The Great Work begins: The Messenger has arrived!”
So another American angel once proclaimed, crashing through a ceiling in a blaze of revelation. That particular apparition smashed through plaster; this one just knocks politely. Her big words of revelation? “Room service, sir.”
The man who answers the knock is Martin Luther King Jr., mortal, and on the eve of history. But for the moment, it’s coffee and Pall Malls he’s after. Only hours earlier, he had thundered from the pulpit of Memphis’ Mason Temple, summoning visions of the Promised Land. Here, though, he is restless and spent, muttering tomorrow’s sermon under his breath and barking for his damn coffee.
This is the King playwright Katori Hall gives us in The Mountaintop: not carved in marble or cast in bronze but rendered in skin and nerves. He slumps around in his socks, smelling of sweat and cigarettes. Outside, the skies over Memphis are mighty restless. The country, no less so: war abroad, fury at home, a nation on edge. By the next day, April 4, 1968, unrest would spill into fire.
But for tonight, the divine has slipped into King’s room at the Lorraine Motel under the guise of hospitality. Her name is Camae, and she’s here on God’s business. And by the next evening, King will be dead.
History, of course, records no such visit. The Mountaintop is less reportage than reverie, recasting King’s final night as a fantasia. Camae, as it turns out, has been sent to collect him and escort him into the next world. That conceit, audacious as it is, can feel overinsisted upon, tipping into strain. Yet in The Front Porch Arts Collective’s current revival, presented in collaboration with the Suffolk University Modern Theatre, Hall’s excesses are steadied by Maurice Emmanuel Parent’s graceful and gritty direction.
That steadiness comes not only from Mr. Parent’s hand, but from the two actors at the play’s center, who don’t perform the play so much as channel it, with a power that borders on the miraculous. What emerges is a dynamic that flickers from earthly banter to cosmic revelation, charged with an undertow of desire and a surprising tenderness. Here, those dynamics are wielded by Dominic Carter and Kiera Prusmack, actors of such rare voltage that the play crackles like a live wire, volatile and dazzlingly alive. (It helps that the production is realized with scrupulous care: a dingy motel room, lighting that shifts from the mundane to the metaphysical, and a soundscape that conjures not only the storm outside but the unrest beyond the motel walls.)
What Mr. Carter achieves is not a tidy impression but a portrait in collapse and combustion, not impersonation but revelation. His King is endowed with a volatility hedged by weariness — and sometimes by humor — humanizing the legend to a heartbreaking degree. By the end, Mr. Carter looks nearly too overcome to bow, as if some immense force had just torn clear through him.
Ms. Prusmack, too, seems reshaped by play’s end. What might read as patchwork on the page becomes, in her hands, a figure of coherence and inevitability; she moves with fluency from bawdy swagger to maternal hush to divine proclamation. And when she unleashes a climactic torrent of history, prophecy, grief, and hope, it’s as if she were not an actress but a conduit, overtaken by such power you half expect a post-show exorcism.
When Hall’s ambitions edge toward excess, it is Mr. Parent’s direction that coaxes them back into focus. Time and again, he has demonstrated a particular knack for making Black stories like this one feel like legacies in motion. Whether it’s the spiritual testimony of Breath & Imagination, the musical inheritance of Ain’t Misbehavin’, the blues-haunted elegy of Seven Guitars, or this sacred last night of The Mountaintop, he makes them feel freshly exhumed, the past breathing through the present with unsettling force.
In The Mountaintop, death isn’t closure so much as ignition, and the play’s call to pass the baton lands with particular resonance in Boston, the city where King earned the doctorate that made him “Dr.,” met Coretta Scott on the steps of the New England Conservatory, stood in the pulpit at Twelfth Baptist in Roxbury, and rallied thousands on Boston Common.
In 2025, King’s Promised Land remains both a dream within reach and a dream deferred. Call it a legacy, call it a charge. Either way, The Great Work doesn’t begin; it continues.
Can I get an Amen?
The Mountaintop
Through October 12 at Suffolk University’s Modern Theatre, Boston; frontporcharts.org. Running time: 90 minutes.
Amen!!!
Excellent review of a terrific show.