The Mountaintop offers a loving and sometimes critical vie of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the last night of his life

Conversing with an angel in his Lorraine Motel room, Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop, a Black Theatre Workshop and Neptune Theatre Production, attempts to explore what might have been going through Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s head during his last on Earth.

The production, directed by Toronto-based ahdri zhina mandiela, stars Letitia Brookes as motel maid-turned-angel Camae, and Tristan D. Lalla as Dr. King. Set in a realistically designed motel room created by set designer Eo Sharp, the play’s small cast and unobtrusive design help to highlight King and Camae as the sole focus of the show.

The play isn’t much of a hagiography. Hall’s play is a humanizing, normalizing view of King—the audience sees his faults more than they see his good qualities. He cracks jokes, smokes too much, gets in a pillow fight, and flirts with Camae, despite calling his wife and children earlier in the play. King is, as Camae herself reminds him often, a man given to the same shortcomings of any man. That’s a view of Dr. King that we don’t often get.

This humanizing view of Dr. King is supported by the fact that there are no grand speeches or marches—it’s all just a conversation between King and Camae. In fact, Camae is the only character to make a grand speech in imitation of King, though she admits that she preferred Malcom X.

As the play progresses, its strict realism fades away—King, for instance, calls God on the phone—until the end, when King is given a vision of the future to assure him that his movement will continue without him. The play uses a captivating video display set to a hip-hop soundtrack to show the years roll by up to our present, showing the economic, cultural, and political progress made by African-Americans, but also all the times they have been held back, and the steps backward. Eventually King is assured that there will come a future without poverty, violence, and intolerance, and he chooses to accept his coming death. The Mountaintop gives a realistic, loving, and at times critical view of the iconic Dr. King, stripping away the myth to show the man anxious for the future and trying to do so much to make it a better place.