A Delicate Balance in a Motel Room Onstage

It’s a tiny, little motel room in Memphis in April of 1968. It’s modest. There’s a chair and a couple of beds. It’s raining outside, but the outside is inside. The motel room is onstage in Milwaukee in the March of 2024. It’s an intimate, little space in a studio theatre. Bryant Bentley plays Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the last night of his life. N'Jameh Russell-Camara plays a woman working at the motel on the first day of her new job.


Directed by Dimonte Henning, the drama settles-in quickly amidst the onstage rainstorm and quickly settles its way into the drama of life at the center of the civil rights movement during the late 1960s. The drama grabs hold of the stage and doesn’t let go for a full 100 minutes or so without intermission. It opens in an earthbound search for cigarettes in the middle of the rain and ends in a fantastically nebulous space that still manages to find a deep grounding in the heart of human emotion.


Henning orchestrates things with a fairly deft mastery of the shift from realism to something more than realism. It’s a gradual shift that sometimes runs the risk of lurching forward too far into something bigger, but Henning keeps everything onstage firmly focussed on the heart of matters for long enough to keep it all totally emotionally captivating from beginning to end. The balance between realism and something else is a very, very difficult thing to manage given the nature of the drama. This is the last night of a man who has become a legend. This is the motel room in the evening--backstage in the theatre of human endeavor before his death on the balcony beyond the front door the next morning.


Bentley is handed one of the most difficult jobs imaginable onstage. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Is a force of nature in US history. His name instantly conjures images and audio of unimaginable gravity that echo through the decades. No one actor could do justice to that legend onstage. Playwright Katori Hall isn’t focussing on the legend, though--she’s focussing on the man. Bentley provides a solid emotional grounding for a man who knew that there were people who wanted him dead...a man in desperate need of a cigarette who was suffering from stresses of all kinds. Bentley cleverly renders those stresses for the stage.


N’Jameh Russell-Camara is handled the job of doing much of the heavy lifting in shifting the background of the play from simple historical drama to something much heavier. She manages the transformation with grace and poise as she plays one of the countless, nameless victims of racial violence that have tragically etched themselves into the soul of the US throughout history. N’Jameh Russell-Camara is playing a woman on her first day on a new job. The tension of untested energies in that role cascade through the actress with emotional acrobatics that render an impressively complex picture of a single person meant to represent so many others.


Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of The Mountaintop runs through March 24th at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre. For ticket reservations and more, visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online.