Should Martin Luther King Be Humanized?

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had dreams of becoming a baseball player or an opera singer and nightmares that involved dead pigeons. He smoked cigarettes, drank whiskey and for a time carried a gun. Before his marriage to Coretta Scott he dated a white woman with thoughts of matrimony; afterwards he had extramarital affairs. He was a practical joker and liked to laugh. He changed the world.

Some of this I knew already; some of it sounds imagined; all of it is in
“The Man in Room 306,” a one-man show written and performed by Craig Alan Edwards, being presented at 59E59 Theater through February 14. The title refers to the room in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where King stayed the night before he was assassinated in 1968.

The 90-minute play pictures King in his room in the motel (now a National Civil Rights Museum) talking on the telephone with his staff, eating a quick meal, trying to write a speech with little success, shouting at the bug he discovers planted by the F.B.I., praying. But mostly he talks to the audience about his life. He touches on largely familiar highlights, such as his difficult relationship with his father, his courtship of his wife, his first involvement in the civil rights movement, his winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, his single meeting with Malcolm X (“‘Someone’s always watching us,’he said, ‘They’ll never let us grow old Martin.’”)

Edwards first wrote and performed this play some 15 years ago, which was less than a decade after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day became a federal holiday to mark King’s birthday on January 15th, although celebrated each year on the third Monday of the month.

Edwards is surely the right actor for the role, capturing the cadences in King’s speaking style, and bearing a resemblance to him physically, although I suspect Edwards looked more like the King we remember when Edwards first started performing the role. It makes sense that this actor, who has done Shakespeare mostly in regional theater and appeared in episodes of the various “Law and Order” franchises, would want to create a meaty part for himself.

I have no doubt that the effort here is a sincere one to humanize a figure that has been canonized in American history and culture. It is an enterprise that has engaged a variety of artists. Lee Daniels, the director of “Precious,” is reportedly planning to direct a film about King entitled “Selma.” A 1978 miniseries “King: The Martin Luther King Story” starred Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson. Billy Dee Williams played King on Broadway in the 1976 “I Have A Dream,” which lasted 88 performances. These efforts to bring imagination and art, or at least entertainment, in the rendering of King have not been as well-received as the numerous biographies and histories and documentaries.

The problem is something of a paradox. The effort to humanize King holds the danger of simultaneously trivializing and lionizing a man who often said (and says again in “The Man in Room 306″) “it’s the foot soldiers that win the war, not the generals.” Yet the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement are remembered, if at all, in the abstract. It is King Day, not Civil Rights Day, that’s a national holiday. The very things that people celebrated about King — his willingness to shoulder the burden of an entire movement starting at the age of 26; his largely successful strategies in defeating an age-old injustice; above all, his ability to articulate the yearnings and despair of an oppressed people in a way that stirred and persuaded all people — are in danger of being forgotten, overshadowed by his celebrity. The antidote, it seems to me, is not to show the “human” King, the King who smoked or joked as if these are startling revelations, but in reminding us of King the eloquent activist and strategist and member of a movement – what led him and the others to their roles, what barriers they faced, how and why they were successful at overcoming them.

Edwards ends “The Man in Room 306″ with a recitation of much of King’s last speech, “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop.” Apparently, the actor has a second theater piece that he performs in schools and churches, King Alive, offering excerpts of King’s speeches. Clearly, Edwards understands the power of King’s own words, which were evident from his very first speech in the civil rights movement, when he was first chosen to lead the Montgomery bus boycott:

“We are here this evening for serious business,” he began. “There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression….The only weapon we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest…There will be no crosses burned at any bus stops in Montgomery. There will be no white persons pulled out of their homes and taken out on some distant road and murdered. There will be nobody among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation.”

It is this King — his own words manifesting not just commitment and cadence but revealing a sly intellect and painting a chilling picture of the perilous times — that I would most want to see depicted on the stage.