It’s nighttime in Memphis and rain is pouring. Inside the Lorraine Motel, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lies with a fever and sore throat. Earlier—unknowingly, hours before his death—he had given his final speech, telling the audience at Mason Temple: “I’ve been to the mountaintop.”

While the speech became one of King’s most famous, we rarely think of its opening words. After being introduced by a colleague, King said, “I listened to [t]his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

As a play, The Mountaintop occupies the space between that “eloquent and generous introduction” and the man himself—between history and art, memory and truth. Specifically, The Mountaintop takes place in the hours after King’s speech and just before his death, expanding on historical events into a fictionalized encounter with a mysterious young woman. Written by Katori Hall and directed by Sinjin Jones, the current production at Mountain View’s Pear Theatre runs through Feb. 19, with a live streaming option available. The play runs in repertory with Sunset Baby, also directed by Jones, which extends the former play’s themes of civil rights into the present day.

Growing up, Jones remembers thinking, “Man, what we are reading in the context of this class doesn’t feel like enough.” Too often, history can feel like the story of larger-than-life heroes, far removed from our everyday experience. But behind the history books and speeches are imperfect people—even someone as lionized as Dr. King.

“I’ve always been interested in the stories behind the history,” Jones says. “[King] was pulled out of bed to do that speech. We don’t think about that when we think about the beauty and the awesomeness of his words. What does it take for someone to go deliver this speech in the pouring rain, exhausted and hoarse after traveling the country for so long?”

The story behind The Mountaintop mirrors the path of recent political history: it was first staged in 2009, on the heels of the election of Barack Obama, when pundits declared his presidency the culmination of Dr. King’s work (Obama himself often quoted King’s belief that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”). But by the time the play premiered at The Pear in 2016, much of that hope for change seemed to have curdled.

The Mountaintop draws from history, yet takes us beyond the historical record, leaving space for recontextualization with each staging and new interpretation.

“This play really takes a hard look at the history of the future,” Jones says, adding it “has a lot to do with what I believe our context is right now. Which is to say, I feel like there’s a lot of work to do.”

Part of the work to do is realizing that history is not a passive thing, but something we must continue to struggle with and lay claim to.

“We all have to figure out how we’re going to do this work, because we don’t have a Dr. Martin Luther King,” Jones says. “The things that we thought we had moved past, maybe we haven’t moved past as far as we thought. In the last five years, that has become pretty clear—that some of the wounds we thought we’d healed were maybe just Band-Aided over.”

And while much has changed since 1968, year after year King’s words find new resonance.

“I hope audiences leave with a sense [that King] passed the baton to us,” Jones says. “Who’s going to pick up the baton?”

Here, Jones’s words invoke King’s own conclusion on that rainy night in Memphis, looking ahead at what Jones calls “the history of the future.”

“I would like to live a long life,” King told his audience. “But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. And I may not get there with you. But I want you to know…that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

The Mountaintop
Through Feb 19, Various Times, $38
Pear Theatre, Mountain View

This Saturday, Community School of Art and Music honor MLK’s birthday with a free online event: Bay Area jazz bassist Marcus Shelby performing selections from his 2011 album Soul of the Movement: Meditations on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The album interweaves originals like “Memphis (I Am a Man)” with spirituals like “There is a Balm in Gilead” and compositions like Charles Mingus’s “Fables of Faubus,” about Governor Faubus’s attempt to keep Little Rock Central High School segregated in 1957. In between selections, Shelby speaks about the importance of music in civil rights movements.

Marcus Shelby Quartet
Sat, 7:30pm, Free
Online Event