“Leadership is a lonely affair,” writes Valerie Curtis-Newton in the director’s notes for The Mountaintop, a play that reimagines the final night of one of the towering figures of the 20th century, Martin Luther King Jr. Curtis-Newton, a nominee for this year’s Stranger Genius Award in theater, emphasized this loneliness in her adaptation of the play, which was written by Katori Hall and premiered in London in 2009.

Curtis-Newton’s MLK, performed by Reginald Andre Jackson, is not just packed (or wracked) with nervous energy, but seems almost powerless. This play is supposed to show us a great man’s human side—he smokes too much, he is addicted to coffee, he has a weakness for beautiful women—but what we see instead is a man who is not even good at being just a human. Something in him is stunted or broken in such a way that he can only talk deeply, truly, meaningfully to a crowd, never to another person.

The play begins with MLK entering the last room of his life, which is on the second floor of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. It’s raining outside, he is waiting for a colleague to return with a packet of cigarettes, he is working on a speech. The 39-year-old looks about 60. He orders coffee from room service, and a beautiful young woman, Camae (Brianne A. Hill), delivers it. She is slender and worldly, swears like a sailor, and has the confidence of youth. MLK hits on her almost right away. She is not surprised or bothered by his advances. But the MLK of the pulpit isn’t the MLK of the bedroom. The eloquence of the preacher is absent from the man as a player. He badly wants to fuck Camae, but he is so awkward about it. It is embarrassingly obvious that he has the neediness of a very lonely person. Will she fuck him? Will she not? When MLK realizes Camae isn’t who he thinks she is (just another beautiful woman), the play takes a bizarre but interesting turn.

To conclude: The set for this production of The Mountaintop is simple and convincing (the sign for the motel is almost a perfect replica of the original), Jackson plays his own MLK rather than being exactly like MLK (this would have sent him into impressionist territory), and Curtis-Newton’s direction correctly places more dramatic weight on the first part of the play than the second, which departs the possibly real for the definitely unreal. recommended