Healdsburg’s The 222 concludes its season of professional drama with The Mountaintop, co-directed by Aldo Billingsley and Rebecca Novick. Playwright Katori Hall’s 2009 imagining of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last night on Earth runs through April 14.

It’s late in the evening of April 3, 1968 and Dr. King (Ron Chapman) has returned to room 306 of The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He’s just delivered his I’ve Been to the Mountaintop sermon and is struggling to craft a speech in support of the local sanitation workers who are on strike for equitable pay, improved working conditions, and safety.

After sending his friend Ralph Abernathy out for a pack of cigarettes, he calls down to the front desk in search of a cup of coffee. A knock at the door heralds the arrival of motel maid Camae (Sam Jackson) with the coffee. Dr. King invites her in with the hope of bumming a cigarette from her. Their casual conversation soon deepens into a discussion of civil rights, the movement, and the violence that seems to attach itself to peaceful protest.   

The conversations lead to moments of self-reflection, doubt and even flirtation that culminate in a pillow fight and physical exhaustion. A slip of the tongue brings Dr. King to the realization that Camae isn’t who she appears to be. The play then goes in an unexpected direction, ultimately ending in the devastating event of which we all are too aware.

Playwright Hall has said that she wanted to bring Dr. King off the pedestal he’s been placed upon and back down to Earth, where he can be seen as an ordinary man who achieved extraordinary things, as a way for other ordinary people to appreciate their own capabilities.   

So we meet an iconic figure who has holes in his socks and a foot odor problem. We hear him talking on the phone with his wife and speaking of his children. We see him treat the vows of marriage as less than sacrosanct.

Playing an icon can never be easy for an actor, and playing one stripped of everything that made them an icon must be doubly challenging.  Chapman delivers on the playwright’s desire for “ordinariness” in the character while dutifully delivering hints of the cadence of Dr. King’s voice so that the audience never loses a sense of who this ordinary man is.

The bombast is delivered by Jackson as Camae but to reveal much about the character’s journey would rob the audience of their own discovery.  Suffice it to say that Jackson absolutely glows in the role.

Previous productions at The 222 used minimal technical elements, but this show utilizes a lighting design, a sound design, and projections. While they were all functional, they will need to up their game in this department.

The Mountaintop was written in the time of the Obama Presidency, when there was a sense that our country had reached a new level in dealing with the issues of race. The backsliding over the last fifteen years and the coarsening of our national character casts a shadow over the play that, despite its culminating tragedy, originally managed to have a somewhat hopeful ending.

Sadly, that hope has been replaced by fear.

‘The Mountaintop’ runs through April 14 at The 222 in The Paul Mahder Gallery, 222 Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg. Friday & Saturday, 7:30 pm; Sunday, 2 pm. $45-$105. Students free with ID. 707.473.9152. the222.org

Photos by Paul Mahder

This review originally appeared in an edited version in the North Bay Bohemian and Healdsburg Tribune.