In his final days, Martin Luther King, Jr. was under scrutiny and stress.
On the night before his death, King gave a speech called, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” foreshadowing that his time on earth may be coming to an end. On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated outside of his room at the Lorraine Motel.
Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop” gives audiences insight into what King may have been thinking and feeling during this time in his life, reimagining King’s last night on earth inside his motel room after giving his “Mountaintop” speech.
The play is the latest production at Detroit Public Theatre, running until Sunday. The Mountaintop is directed by Detroit actor Brian Marable and stars Brian Sullivan Taylor as King and Rebecca Rose Mims as a maid at the motel named Camae. She brings him room service and the two engage in a conversation that causes King to confront his destiny and legacy.
Taylor is an actor, director and acting coach from Southfield. He is the founder of the Detroit Drama Studio in Royal Oak, where he trains actors using the Ivana Chubbuck technique, named after one of the most popular acting coaches in Hollywood. Taylor made his professional acting debut in 2017 in Detroit Public Theatre’s award-nominated production of Dominique Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew.” In addition to theater, Taylor can be seen on the Tubi show, “McGraw Ave: H-Block.”
Mims is a native Detroiter who started acting as a child with the Mosaic Youth Theater of Detroit. She’s becoming a staple at Detroit Public Theatre, starring in productions “Here There Are Blueberries” and “Confederates” last year.
Tickets begin at $52. While the 7:30 p.m. Thursday show and 2 p.m. shows for Saturday and Sunday are sold out, tickets are still available for the 7:30 p.m. shows on Friday and Saturday.
BridgeDetroit talked with Taylor and Mims about the preparation and research for their roles, working with Marable and why they were drawn to the show.
BridgeDetroit: What drew both of you to audition for “The Mountaintop?”
Taylor: I saw a production back in 2019. It was pretty decent, but I didn’t get the full scope of the story. Then, when this opportunity came around, it was kind of like my footsteps were ordered toward this audition. Quite honestly, it was Rebecca who really glued me to this project. When I came in and worked with Rebecca, I was like, “I don’t know who this is, but she’s good, so I need to work with her.”
Mims: When I was in Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit, we would get monologues to work on, and one of our teachers recommended the monologue from this play (The Mountaintop) and that was the first time I had become familiar with this play. I loved the monologue. But, back then, when I was 16 (she’s 26 now), I didn’t think that I could play a role like this. Life kept happening, and I saw Detroit Public Theatre posted their latest season. I was going to do their general auditions because a job is a job, but then I saw that they were doing The Mountaintop, and I got really excited because I love the show. I’ve always wanted to do a play that’s just two people, where you stay on stage the whole time. When I auditioned for the generals, I actually used the monologue that I got at Mosaic, and they cast me. It was definitely my teachers recommending reading material to me that drew me to the story.
BridgeDetroit: Brian, taking on the role of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a heavy lift. Did you feel a lot of pressure?
Taylor: This is the first character that I’ve ever done in my entire career that was actually based on a real person. Even though this is a fictional retelling of the night before–nobody knows what exactly happened in this room–there is a great weight of responsibility, especially in the Black community, in delivering a portrait of Dr. King that people can look at and say, “I can imagine this being Dr. King.”
But as an actor, it’s a great role to play. Before I hit the stage, I say two things: “God be with me, God speak through me.” And now I say, “Brother King, please walk with me on this stage as I do these lines in honor of you.” So yeah, it’s a mental lift, an emotional lift, a physical lift. Me and Rose are always tired by the end of the show.
BridgeDetroit: Rebecca, you’re playing a fictional character in the show. What has it been like bringing Camae to life?
Mims: It’s definitely been really easy. Katori did a good job at creating a person that is, in a lot of ways, in direct opposition with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as far as social standings, opinions. When I started working on the character, it was like, “OK, what is this play telling me about the relationship, what is this relationship telling me about this woman’s views?” That made it really easy to just let the language of the play take me on a journey. I definitely looked up people who were living around that time in Memphis. I looked into a couple of the women who were working at the Lorraine Motel at the time, watching a couple of interviews, looking at pictures. But I don’t have to do much work. I think that the play takes care of the integrity of these two individuals …I just get to live in the character and her choices and her words.
BridgeDetroit: Brian, did you do much research for the role?
Taylor: I did extensive research on Dr. King and where he was mentally during that time. As I started diving into it, there was a lot that I did not know about Dr. King. I respect him more than I’ve ever had now that I know him as the man he was. A lot of us idolize Dr. King, especially in the Black community. We’re fed Dr. King at a very young age in school and we put him on a pedestal. Looking at the human side of who this man was has made me revere him even more. When I started researching and studying the character, I was really focused on the psychology of Dr. King and where he was at that point in time, like what he possibly could have been feeling, the isolation that he was probably feeling as one of the most hated men in America. He had the will to deal with the idea that anybody from anywhere, at any time, could be trying to kill him. Having the will, the courage and the bravery to still go out on Front Street and preach what he was preaching, and try to complete the mission that he was completing, it’s mind boggling. Not many people have that in them, myself included. I can’t imagine what he could have been dealing with.
BridgeDetroit: What message do you hope audiences take with them after seeing the play?
Taylor: The line at the very end of the show is “The baton passes on,” and the overall meaning of it is that we as individuals have to keep the dream alive in the sense of continuing to do community work. Me and Rose aren’t preachers, but this is our ministry and it’s our responsibility, with the gift that God has given us, to continue to do good work and to move society forward. We have to continue to pass the baton, because we are in a relay race for humanity. There are people who are really hurting, and there are powers that be that are doing their best to keep those people hurting.
Dr. King was a person for everyone. He wanted to push Black people forward, but he was looking toward the future for everybody. And so, by the time people are hopefully standing up and giving us a standing ovation, I hope that they’re taking away something like, “When I leave this theater, what am I going to do to help the person behind me or beneath me? How am I going to pass the baton in the times that we’re in?”
Mims: I do want there to be this idea that Black history isn’t Black history, it’s just American history. And the suffering and the hardships that Black Americans have gone through affect all of us. The laws that have been made to oppress some people will eventually oppress all people. When we split up our share of history, then the load isn’t as heavy. We just all need to take ownership of our history of America. We (Black people) are continuously not healing from the un-acknowledgment of the slave trade, and being slaves for 400 years, and then getting free and not getting free, and all these underhanded things, instead of actually acknowledging how we made this country so we can move past it. We’re not going to be able to heal if we don’t acknowledge what’s already there. Part of that acknowledgement is an acceptance of everyone’s share of this history.