On April 3, 1968, in support of a union of black workers on strike, Martin Luther King gave a prophetic speech entitled I’ve Been to the Mountaintop (I went to the top of the mountain): “I may not go there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will reach the promised land. The next day, the leader of the American civil rights movement, winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
With The Mountaintop, face-to-face between the pastor and a mysterious maid named Camae, the American playwright Katori Hall imagines Martin Luther King’s last night on earth. Created in London in 2009, the play opened on Broadway in 2011 with Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett. Translated here, it must be said in an unlikely language, by the Quebecer of Congolese origin Edith Kabuya, the play is directed by Catherine Vidal, who signs her first production at Duceppe.
magical realism
It is certainly the dreamlike nature of this closed session that prompted the director, a specialist in magic realism, to rub shoulders with it. Indeed, the lively exchange between the two characters takes, after a frankly concrete beginning, a turn in which more and more strangeness, irrationality and mystery intervene. Who is this woman embodied with a lot of banter by Sharon James? Who does she report to? At the FBI? At the CIA? To the Black Panthers? What is she really doing in the room of the pastor who has a dream?
Faced with this dialogue between the earthly and the eternal, an oratory contest whose premise recalls that of Visitor by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, we first believe in a game of seduction, a flirtation in which the two characters blithely indulge, but we quickly understand that the visitor is there to guide the pastor, to encourage him to take stock of the road traveled, to tame the idea of one’s own death, but also to envisage the continuation of things, the continuation of the fight by those and those to whom it is time to pass the baton.
Didier Lucien was never afraid to take risks, never hesitated to explore light and shadow, never shied away when it came to putting so much conviction into translating evil as goodness. After having personified tyranny by slipping into the skin of François Duvalier (Do I have dictator blood?Space libre, 2017), he currently embodies one of the most inspiring black people of all time. His interpretation is honest, dosed, even nuanced, but unfortunately not transcendent.
In general, the show, which nevertheless addresses a great subject, a great destiny, struggles to arouse great emotions. After an hour, the performance, lasting a total of 100 minutes, shows a slowdown. The debate between the protagonists seems to stall, the relationship stop progressing. Although Geneviève Lizotte’s scenography seeks to reproduce the exiguity of the motel room, something in the space, in the distance between the stage and the room continues to serve the camera. The final painting, which we certainly imagined as a bridge stretched between 1968 and 2022, between Memphis and Montreal, is really only a clumsy deployment of video projections, light and smoke.