The Man in Room 306, a new off-Broadway Play about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

February 4, 2010 by ManinRoom306

When I first joined The Man in Room 306, Craig Alan Edwards (writer, performer, and co-producer) gave me a copy of a New Yorker article entitled “How David Beats Goliath” by Malcolm Gladwell.  As I read it, I realized that our struggle in bringing a politically important work of art to New York City not only mirrored David’s battle with Goliath, it also emulated the organizational and emotional challenges of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the last months of his life.  This is not to say that we suffered the same hardships or fought giants of the same proportions, but we certainly had our work cut out for us and we had to face it with creativity and sincerity.

I’d argue that the seeds for this project were planted during Craig’s college years, when he attended Boston University, Dr. King’s alma mater.  Although at the time he was studying communications, he discovered a profound respect for Dr. King’s work and began listening to recordings of the Civil Rights Leader’s voice every day.  It was not until well after college that he took up acting and playwriting, and even then, despite his love for Dr. King, he was not at all convinced that he should create a play about the man.  Hasn’t it all been done before? Hasn’t this historic figure been glorified in every way imaginable? But then he realized, yes, King has been put on a pedestal and idolized by popular culture, but we’ve whitewashed history – we’ve forgotten that Dr. King is a man, not a messiah.  And in forgetting that, we fail to realize that we ourselves, for all our human faults and weaknesses, can accomplish incredible things.
 
Craig began meeting with Cheryl Katz, director and dramaturg for The Man in Room 306, and they collaborated on the basic ideas behind the play.  That was in 1995.  Fifteen years later, they continue to rework and revitalize the work – the rehearsal process for this New York production (there have already been two in New Jersey and one in Memphis, TN) involved in-depth reexamination of the shape of the play, clarification of the actor’s choices, brand-new text, and extremely specific definition of physical and visual elements.  The goal in all this work was to reach a greater sense of interesting and believable theatricality while always remaining grounded in their extensive research of Dr. King’s life and personality.  The first rehearsal I attended started with Craig and Cheryl reading a timeline of the final week of Dr. King’s life to give them a sense of the preceding circumstances and the extreme stress that the man was facing on his last night.
 
One of the first things I learned in the process of bringing The Man in Room 306 to New York was that everything we did was a balancing act – business and art are not mutually exclusive, but you need to be careful not to neglect either or the whole project will lose its integrity and its driving force.  After several hours of work in the rehearsal room finessing the shape of each chunk of text and clarifying Craig’s actions, he would hurry into our small “Producer’s Office” to check his Blackberry and make phone calls on his 10 minute “break.”  Our approach to marketing was built with as much creativity and attention as our approach to rehearsals, and involved everything from personalized emails sent to hundreds of professors, student organizations, and churches, to flyer handouts at AME and Baptist churches in Manhattan, to phone calls to Congressional Representatives and Human Rights Organizations offering group ticket discounts.  As someone involved directly in the marketing effort, I witnessed firsthand the extensive work we did to announce our production so that the people who came to our play were people who would really be affected by seeing a human view of Dr. King.
 
As the project moved forward, I educated myself about the Civil Rights Movement and the work of Dr. King – I watched documentaries Cheryl lent me and read articles out of the dramaturgical book that Craig assembled. It was thrilling to see that Craig’s imagination of King as an exhausted, overworked, flawed human being was based on the truth that so few people see. I realized that theatrically and politically, this play is about transformation.  From a dramatic standpoint, it sees the main character at a time of profound internal and external conflict, in the midst of a storm, on the last night of his life.  As the play progresses, King becomes overwhelmed and eventually defeated by not only the idea of a hostile government who spied on him and instigated riots which culminated in the death of a 16-year-old boy a week before, but also by his own faults as a person, his self-perceived inability to live up to his public image, and, of course, the infamous extramarital affairs he was having.  The end of the play sees him transform, however – through the power of God and love, he is rejuvenated, and we see him transition into the public King to deliver his all-famous “Mountaintop” speech.
 
From a political perspective, the audience finally gets to see King as he was at the end – a visionary man, no longer just a Civil Rights Leader, but someone who was brave enough to speak out against the Vietnam war and to begin organizing a Poor People’s Campaign, in which underpaid workers of all races would mobilize throughout the country and march on Washington, sit in on Congress, and force the government to face the ubiquitous issue of poverty that still persists today.  King’s was a holistic view, and he didn’t see war and poverty as separate issues from racism.  In a time where the world is still pounded by poverty, racism, and war, King’s belief in the Power of Love is encouraging, inspiring, and transforming. This play is not merely entertaining; it is one that is all too important at this time in history.
 
--Written by Ezra Lowrey, Assistant Producer/Production Management Intern for The Man in Room 306, and Freshman at Bennington College.
 
THE MAN IN ROOM 306 is currently playing at 59 East 59th Street Theaters, and runs until February 14th. Find us at www.themaninroom306.com, www.59E59.org, and www.ticketcentral.com.