THE MOUNTAINTOP
Dr. King’s last night is imagined at Hoboken New Jersey’s Mile Square Theatre. Through May 3, 2026
Hassiem Muhammad as Dr. Martin Luther King and Ken Holloway as Camea in The Mountaintop. Photo: Kim Lorraine
Reviewed by Ellen Webster
Let’s start with what this is: a two-person show. And let’s start with what that means: nowhere to hide. Two actors, one room, one night, and the whole weight of a life hanging in the air between them. No intermission. No exits. No one to hand the scene to when the oxygen gets thin. Just two people who have to hold it — all of it — for the entirety of the evening, and make it look like the most natural thing in the world.
It is not the most natural thing in the world. It is an extraordinary ask. And Hassiem Muhammad and Kendra Holloway deliver.
The Mountaintop, Katori Hall’s fictionalized account of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.’s final hours in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, is playing at Hoboken’s Mile Square Theatre, and I’ve seen it twice. Which tells you something.
We live in a culture that loves nothing more than pulling the great ones apart — as though we are owed exposure to all the flaws. But Hall does something bolder: she gives us the mess and keeps the man intact. Perhaps the height of a mountain can only be appreciated from its base. In that way, King’s greatness, residing imperfectly beside his frailties, makes him more remarkable, not less, and I left the theater closer to him because I came to know him better.
Thanks to scenic designer Matthew J. Pick and scenic painter Jordyn Kramer, we walk into the theater and there we are. In Room 306. Two double beds, a dial phone, stained carpet, and — God help us — what may or may not be black mold creeping up from the baseboards near the bathroom. This is not a monument. This is a motel room where a man spent his last night on earth. Mahalia Jackson’s voice opens the show, and the ground is set.
Director Jamil A. C. Mangan, who has himself portrayed King in this very play, describes his entry point as “not reverence for the icon, but care for the human being.” That care is everywhere in this production. The pacing is relentless — dialogue fast and pithy — and the physical life of the show is far more than you’d expect from two people in a fixed space. It’s more choreography than movement. King wrestling with furniture and rolling on the floor, and Camae atop the bed, delivering her own improvised Sermon on the Mount.
Here is King — rendered with restless, kinetic energy by Hassiem Muhammad — a man crushed under the weight of what he must do and who he must be, frightened, coughing, chain-smoking and enjoying a good flirt with the motel maid who has arrived to deliver a cup of coffee. He is a man setting himself aside, over and over, to carry the cause forward. That is not weakness dressed up as strength. That is the actual definition of courage: the internal reckoning, the fear not absent but overruled, the showing up anyway. Muhammad’s portrayal makes it impossible to look away.
Watching all of it — absorbing it, reflecting it back, puncturing it when necessary — is Camae. She is introduced as the maid, but that’s not the half of it. Kendra Holloway plays her with unapologetic sass and a speed that can match Muhammad beat for beat, and she is magnetic in a way that’s genuinely hard to explain except to say it’s as present in her stillness as when she’s speaking. Through her we see what Hall wants us to know of King — the frailty, yes, but also the unbounded humanity that makes the courage mean something. Meanwhile, Camae’s metaphysical qualities creep in so slowly you almost miss them. Until you can’t.
Hall is not writing a gossip tell-all. The warts are present and accounted for. Yet somehow, in her hands, they don’t diminish him. They reveal him—both human and divine, as all of us are, if we’re being honest.
There is a moment, and you’ll know it when it lands, when King is mid-soliloquy about fear, about how we’re all scared of each other and of ourselves:
KING: Fear makes us human. We all need the same basic things. A hug. A smile. A—
CAMAE: Smoke?
The audience laughed. Both times. It’s funny because it’s true, and true because it’s human, and that’s exactly where Hall has been taking us all along.
The ending first belongs to Camae, then to King, and ultimately to each of us. They speak of the baton — not passed over us or around us, but through us. A screen is drawn across the full width of the stage and projected onto it is a media cascade of video and stills, the decades since April 4, 1968, both the heartache and the advancements. And King — still lit, still visible — stands behind the scrim and watches alongside us. It is quietly devastating.
I found myself thinking of what American Benedictine nun Joan Chittester said when asked what we should do in the face of the world’s suffering. Her simple reply: “Something.” Unspoken in the theater as the lights came up was that word, suspended in the air like an invitation.
Notes:
- Accents and dialects are part of the immersion.
- Give yourself a few minutes to settle in and you’ll soon feel at home with the rhythm.
Because of language, recommended audience age 12+. - Seats on the far right may have obstructed views.
- Mile Square Theatre seats 116, and that intimacy is a gift to this show.
The Mountaintop runs through May 3, 2026, and it rewards seeing more than once.
Mile Square Theatre
1400 Clinton Street
Hoboken, NJ
(201) 683-7014
https://www.milesquaretheatre.org/events/the-mountaintop#performances
Review submitted by:
Ellen Webster
Author’s Bio:
Ellen is a writer focused on aging and connection. A Maine native now living in Hoboken with her husband, she is curious about life after 60 and opportunities that emerge. She has spent more than a decade hand-writing 13,000+ thank-you notes for acts of kindness and humanity. Join her free Age Buoyantly community at: https://www.ellenwebster.com/
