By Katori Hall. Directed by Janet Wright. An Arts Club production. At the Granville Island Stage on Wednesday, February 18. Continues until March 14

I liked it more than I disliked it.

Mostly, I was seduced by the magic realism of Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop, which imagines the last night in the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He’s in a motel room in Memphis. He has just delivered his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech and is disappointed that his audience wasn’t bigger. Then, in Hall’s telling, he is visited by a motel maid named Camae.

Discovering Camae’s identity is the greatest pleasure of the evening and I won’t rob you of that experience by giving it away. But I will say that it’s exciting to follow Hall as she allows the naturalistic to slip into the fantastical. It’s particularly apparent in the theatre that reality is an act of the collective imagination. Hall revels in that creativity and, in doing so, hints at transcendence. During the course of the evening, King discovers that he will be assassinated the next day but, thanks to the magic of the theatre, he gets a peek at the bigger picture, including the future.

Hall delivers a pleasingly friendly take on the ideas of imperfection and forgiveness, and she dares to broach the dialectic between peaceful protest and violent revolution.
But The Mountaintop doesn’t go deep. The tagline on the publicity for this Arts Club production is “humanizing Martin Luther King”, and we do find out that the character has stinky feet and holey socks. But Hall brings virtually no psychological heft or sociological context to the piece. In the end, The Mountaintop is a naïve fairytale about a hero, as opposed to a substantial portrait of a man.

And the script contains some clumsy writing. When King is alone on-stage, he often explains his actions: “Shit! I forgot to pack my toothbrush again!” And the conventions that Hall employs are sometimes arch: King and Camae have a cute pillow fight. Most disappointingly, once King realizes that he’s going to die the next day, the dramatic tension drains away; King begs for more life, but we know how that turns out.

Under Janet Wright’s direction, Dion Johnstone eschews impersonation—he never attempts King’s distinctive cadences—but he delivers a movingly vulnerable performance. Crystal Balint’s Camae is not as raw—although there’s potential for that—but Balint is a subtle actor who finds plenty of Camae’s sass and compassion.

nCulturally odd moment: at one point, Camae puts on King’s suit jacket and shoes to show him what he should say in his speeches. Preaching, she hits a furious, repeated note, “Fuck the white man! Fuck the white man! Fuck the white man!” On opening night, the mostly white audience laughed.