Mill Mountain Theatre opens its 2017 Season with a two-performance presentation of The Mountaintop, an acclaimed drama depicting the final hours of life of American civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. The show on Feb. 24 and 25 also will begin MMT’s new Waldron Fringe Series, a group of plays with serious and provocative topics presented as staged readings in the 120-seat Waldron Stage.
Beginning that journey with a play about Martin Luther King Jr. in Black History Month should raise questions for our audience about contemporary issues of civil disobedience, human rights and fear of oppression, she said. The play is set in 1968 on the eve of King’s assassination in a motel room in Memphis, TN. The staged reading format uses projections rather than full scenery and basic costumes so the audiences’ focus and attention is on the text and storytelling by actors who are just a few feet away.
The artistic staff of The Mountaintop consists of three New York-based African-Americans who are new to Roanoke audiences: Director G. D. Kimble, Blake Morris portraying King, and Maribel Martinez in the role of Camae, a hotel maid who brings coffee to King’s hotel room and engages him in extended conversation about his private fears and anxieties masked by his very public career.
“The power of this piece is that it shows, before he was an icon, Dr. King was just a man,” Kimble said. “A man like any other human being with the same hopes, fears, faults and yes – mortality. It’s in that humanity that we find seeds and the fuel for his greatness and the lesson that greatness lies in all of us. In these times of discord any one of us through anger, compassion, sacrifice, and guts can affect change. Any one of us, no matter how small we believe we are, can be the single voice that ignites a million more.”
Tickets for The Mountaintop are $15 each, less than half Mill Mountain Theatre’s price for mainstage productions. Reservations can be made by calling the Center in the Square box office at 540-342-5740. The Waldron Stage at 20 Church Ave., downtown Roanoke.
Mill Mountain Theatre’s production of The Mountaintop is made possible in part by generous support by Actors’ Equity Association; Center in the Square; National Endowment for the Arts; and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.
For more information, contact Ginger Poole at (540) 342-5749.
