THE MEETING
The time is Valentine’s Day 1965, but this is no lovefest. Malcolm X’s home has just been firebombed; Dr. King, making a rare visit to the north, is still haunted by the violence of Selma, Alabama. Malcolm X will be assassinated a week later by another Black Muslim; the killing of Dr. King is three years away. But in Stetson’s deeply engaging play, these young men–Malcolm X, 39, and Dr. King, 35–are very alive. So are the dynamic differences between them in strategy, style, and conscience, but these never obscure the bedrock decency and commitment that have pushed them in such different directions.
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Malcolm X refuses to call it progress when a man plunges a knife nine inches into another’s back and pulls it out three; he wants the knife out altogether so that the healing can begin. By that he means self-healing–specifically separatism–not the charity of the oppressor. And unlike “Dr. Chicken Wing,” as he calls Dr. King, Malcolm X does not want to free all people, just his own people. He doesn’t want jobs from a white-owned economy; he wants blacks to own their own businesses. His anthem is not “We shall overcome” but “We shall come over!”
Harry J. Lennix and Percy Littleton achieve their own unity within divergence in Chuck Smith’s superbly orchestrated staging. These are no waxwork impersonations; Lennix and Littleton have done inside jobs on their great men. The physical parallels, however remarkable, matter less than the emotional grounding.
