Broadway’s Memphis connection continues with a third play in which the city is a backdrop.

Guide Jeff Steinberg of Sojourn to the Past speaks to students from the Wilson School in Clinton, Mo., about Room 306, where Martin Luther King Jr. was staying before being assassinated. 
(Photo: Lance Murphey)

“The Mountaintop” is very different territory, however, from the musicals “Memphis” and “Million Dollar Quartet,” which both explore the city’s musical culture and lore.

“The Mountaintop” is not a musical.

The fictionalized version of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last night at the Lorraine Motel explores the idea of the civil rights leader out of the spotlight and off the pedestal that has made him an icon since his 1968 assassination on the balcony of the motel.

The play, by playwright and Memphian Katori Hall and starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett, is on Broadway in New York City through Sunday, Jan. 22.

The set is a re-creation of room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, the room King walked out of and was standing in front of when he was fatally shot.

The real room 306 has drawn visitors to Memphis for nearly 44 years – two decades before the motel became the National Civil Rights Museum.

The play’s set designer, David Gallo, came to the museum to duplicate the look of the room. And the museum cooperated in the detailed study.

“They measured the bed. They measured the bureau of drawers, the desktop,” said Gwen Harmon of the NCRM. “They took photographs up close of the bedspread, the color of the wall, the carpet, the headboards.”

Harmon said the NCRM is well aware of the power of the room, which is the centerpiece of the museum built on the site of the Lorraine Motel.

Visitors Shoji Yajima, left, and wife, Takako Yajima, of Japan visit an exhibit inside the National Civil Rights Museum chronicling the March on Washington.
(Photo: Lance Murphey)

As Memphians and visitors to the city mark the federal holiday honoring King Monday, Jan. 16, the area around the preserved room will again be crowded with people who react in a number of different ways.

“It has always been the highlight of the tour experience. It stands head and shoulders above anything else we do and that, to us, places the museum in a wonderful position of being a site of authenticity,” Harmon said.

The conversion from motel to museum in the early 1990s used some of the same exacting standards based on the preservation of the room by motel owner Walter Bailey from the night of the assassination to the construction of the museum around it.

“They matched the fabrics, matched the colors, matched everything perfectly and kept it as it was except for the glass wall,” Harmon said.

The museum designers also had the benefit of photographs of the room taken in the immediate aftermath of the assassination by famed local photographer Ernest Withers.

“They used pictures of the cigarette butts in the ashtray, the food service that had been sent in,” Harmon said. “That’s how the set designers did it 20 years ago.”

Gallo discovered during his research that the stylized zero in the room number – 306 – was installed upside-down.

“This isn’t the ‘I have a dream’ King,” Hall said of her play in a video interview on the production’s website. “This is a more radical King. This is King – the man, not the myth.”

Jackson plays King and Bassett plays a motel maid. Their discussion is the heart of the drama as they talk about everyday life and King responds in some surprising ways.

“Dr. King was more than just a speech. He’s more than just an idea,” Jackson said in another video on the website. “He was also as flawed as any human being who walked the planet. This play humanizes Dr. King in a way I’ve never seen him humanized.”

Orpheum director Pat Halloran says there are currently no plans for the show to go on tour after it closes on Broadway Sunday.

“That’s something the museum is interested in working with the Orpheum in doing, if we can work with them and partner to bring it to Memphis, even if it’s only for one night,” Harmon said.

A Memphis run would cap a season in which a production of “Memphis” the musical has already played the Orpheum and “Million Dollar Quartet” begins a run there in February.