B Street online play imagines Martin Luther King Jr.’s last night alive

B Street Theatre will return to small screens Aug. 18 with a Zoom production depicting Martin Luther King Jr.’s last night alive in a Memphis hotel room.

The play, “The Mountaintop” by Katori Hall, is being shown this week to commemorate the 53rd anniversary of the March on Washington. The link to watch is available for free via B Street’s website, but there will be opportunities to tip the performers.

Francois Battiste, who has appeared in ABC’s “Ten Days in the Valley,” will play Dr. King. B Street company member Danielle Moné Truitt, who also has a regular role in FOX’s “Deputy,” will play a mysterious maid who converses with King as his assassination draws nearer. Truitt previously played the maid at the play’s West Coast premiere in 2013 and in Los Angeles in 2016.

The three-person production — two actors, plus narrator Vernon Lewis— took some retooling to adapt to a web format, the actors said. But its focus on dialogue helped it translate to Zoom.

“I love that we get to see Martin Luther King in his humanity,” Truitt said. “King was just as human as the rest of us and he did amazing things to change this world.”

The fictional plot follows King as he returns, tired, to his room on April 3, 1968 after delivering his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech.

Truitt said that in order to portray emotion over Zoom, much of the production will focus closely on the actors’ faces as they speak.

“We’re melding two mediums, theater and television,” Battiste said, adding that gestures such as reaching directly into the camera connect the actors both to each other and to the audience.

“There actually isn’t a fourth wall,” said B Street executive producer Jerry Montoya.

Truitt will perform her part in the play from her home in Los Angeles, and Battiste will be filmed from his house in Sacramento.

“I will be in a room where my children are not,” Battiste said.

“The Mountaintop” debuted onstage in London in 2009. It won the Olivier award for Best New Play in March 2010, and Hall was the Black woman playwright to achieve that honor.

Tuesday’s performance will be part of B Street’s Re-Imagine web series, which is produced by Latrice Madkins. Over the past four weeks, the series has showcased a variety of work from Black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) artists including poetry, spoken word, short plays and paintings up for auction.

“Part of what this series is doing is celebrating Black history as also American history,” Montoya said.

B Street hopes to take the series from the web to the stage when live theater is possible again.

This story was originally published August 14, 2020 at 5:00 AM.