by RICHARD ADAMS
The Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King PHOTO/Tom Burruss
Written by Andrew Dolan, directed by Rod Menzies. World premiere, presented by Ensemble Studio Theatre, Los Angeles. Through April 29, 2012 at the Atwater Village Theatre.
The Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King, now receiving its premiere production at Ensemble Studio Theatre in Los Angeles, dives into the turbulent waters of racial stereotyping and identity politics with uncensored abandon. Andrew Dolan’s script is smart, tart, and rich with discomfiting insight. Under the deft direction of Rod Menzies, the ensemble of five attains a depth of social and emotional reality that is palpable and moving without sacrificing the power of ideas to clarify, provoke, challenge, or hurt.
The play revolves around the character of Simon (in a stellar performance by Philip Casnoff), a gadfly sociologist and former social worker whose years in the trenches of Chicago’s notorious public housing project, Cabrini Green, have left him cynical and combative. His tragedy, if it can be considered as such, is that he often mistakes cynicism for realism and mere provocation as speaking truth to power and ignorance. His deeper, and unacknowledged, flaw is that he seems trapped within the very perspectives he critiques, unable or unwilling to confront the class divisions and oppressions that underlie racism in capitalist America.
When we meet Simon, he’s married to a former student, Lashawna (a captivating Tracey A. Leigh); the bitter divorce from his ex-wife has left a nasty residue, and his failure to gain tenure still stings. His new book, “The Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King,” is about to be published. The book is historical fiction, the story of Martin Luther King told through the voices of women with whom King had affairs. The fact that Simon is a white man married to a young black woman writing about a revered American icon from the point of view of black women trips so many landmines of pious hypocrisy that the expected explosions feel all the more potent for their being so thoroughly repressed in heated yet civil academic sparring—until they aren’t.
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