Spring Bee Hiving Moon
Back from the Guthrie and the Penumbra presentation of Mountaintop, a play focused on Martin Luther King’s last night alive in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. As it neared the end, it picked up emotional punch using a clever device that I won’t reveal. The pathos of a man about to die because he stood up for love, for justice, can sound wooden on the page, but to see a real man struggling with acceptance, to hear a real woman empathize with him, that’s different. That’s the power of theatre.
There’s a good metaphor used in it, one you may have heard before, but which was new to me. The civil rights movement, the movement for the poor is not a sprint, but a relay race, with one generation handing on the baton to the next.
When we discussed this play briefly at Christos on Monday, I made the observation that when our generation dies out, the generation who experienced King, Malcom and that whole era will die out, too. That means these characters will pass into history, become captive to interpretation and canonization. A certain amount of that has happened already.
That will be a shame because those years, the 60’s and early 70’s, were so alive and vital. The air crackled with change, with big questions, with thoughts of matters far beyond the vocational worth of a college diploma. And we lived it. It is our direct heritage and I like very much the notion of the baton.
I’m in that part of the race now where the baton is stretched out ahead of me, ready to lay in the hands of another, but my race is not yet run. I’m accelerating, to keep the team ahead.