Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. to "Meet" in the Feb 16 Production
"The Meeting" Convenes at Hertz Auditorium at 7 PM
The play takes the audience back to February 1965 when two great minds - Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - meet in Harlem's historic Hotel Theresa to share their two roads to freedom. Written by Jeff Stetson (Blood on the Leaves), the one-act play is based on a fictionalized meeting between the two leaders. In reality, Malcolm X and Dr. King met only once, fleetingly, on March 26, 1964, in the nation's capital. While that exchange was brief, Stetson has stitched together a highly imagined encounter that captures their humanity, political maturity, and enduring integrity of the two leaders while addressing issues still relevant today: war abroad, violence at home, inner city hopelessness, black self-empowerment, religious diversity...
Plot/Background: Jeff Stetson's affecting 1984 one-act, "The Meeting" imagines Malcolm X, on the night before his fateful appearance at Harlem's Audubon Ballroom, coming to a rapprochement with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Operating on his publicly stated theory that "Dr. King wants the same thing I want: freedom," he has reached out to the black leader with entirely different strategies, perhaps in a first step toward unifying the black civil-rights movement. Whether such a meeting would have taken place and what its political consequences might have been are fascinating to contemplate. Stetson lets us listen, fly-on-the-wall style, to this conceptualized conversation. The action takes place in Harlem's renown Hotel Theresa, where Malcolm X has chosen to stay with his bodyguard Rashad rather than subject friends to the risk of having him in their home. His own house in Elmhurst was recently firebombed, and his pregnant wife, Betty Shabazz, and their children just escaped unharmed. Because of the security risk, Malcolm X has asked Dr. King to come up by the back stairs. The Baptist minister and advocate for peaceful resistance enters panting from the climb.
Stetson structures the visit around three arm-wrestling matches between the two leaders. Malcolm wins the first round, after taking an offensive tact at the outset. Sarcastic and caustic, he contrasts King's Southern, college-educated, Baptist-preacher background with his own Northern, self-educated urban orientation. He derides King's tactics of sit-ins and marches accompanied by the singing of "We Shall Overcome." This is the black-nationalist Malcolm X who once compared integration to coffee diluted with cream. "It used to be hot. It becomes cool. It used to be strong. It becomes weak. It used to wake you up; now it puts you to sleep."
Dr. King wins the second round by demonstrating that his anger at injustice, his fury over black children murdered in their churches and young black women dehumanized by prostitution and drug addiction, is just as powerful as Malcolm X's. But he counters hatred with love in the symbolic gesture of presenting Malcolm X with a doll from his daughter. The toy is a token of sympathy toward the Shabazz children, who lost all their possessions in the firebombing. The third bout ends in a draw as the two men begin to understand each other, to respect and admire their differing stances, and to accept the possibility of martyrdom for the cause.
Stetson's dialogue is often witty and poignant. Malcolm remarks that "he has a dream," then, recollecting himself, adds, "Oh, that's your line." Stetson also humanizes the two leaders. Malcolm is shown as a loving but often absent father and husband who badly wants to spend more time with his family. He suffers from terrible nightmares and responds with black humor to the constant FBI surveillance of his activities. (After a phone call to his wife, he speaks directly to agents he assumes are bugging the phone, requesting that they deliver some take-out food.)
Presented by the Boston-based Grimes Theatre Group, "The Meeting" has received a Louis B. Mayer Award, eight NAACP Theater Awards, and six New York AUDELCO nominations. CWU's Feb 16 production is free and open to the public. Sponsors include: Center for Excellence in Leadership, Diversity Education Center, Black Student Union, and Equity and Services Council. For more information about the event, or for persons of disability to arrange for reasonable accommodation, call 509-963-1687, or (for the hearing impaired) TDD 509-963-2143.
