Dream on "I Dream" puts a new spin on MLK's life and legacy

BY LESLIE HOCHSZTEIN

Atlanta, home of Ebenezer Baptist Church and the King Center, has done so much to promote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy that it could just as easily be dubbed “King City.” Now, with the world premiere of “I Dream,” the civil rights leader’s hometown prepares to honor King’s life and work in a new way. The musical drama, billed as a “rhythm and blues opera,” is through-composed—told entirely through song, the dialogue sung rather than spoken, against continuous, non-repetitive music—adding a layer of emotion books and documentaries can’t reach.

 “I can remember being moved in very many musical and opera pieces way more than I remember what they said,” says Douglas Tappin, the show’s writer and composer. “I hope that that adds a dimension that typically hasn’t been available in some historical recountings of the story.”

Emotion runs deep throughout the musical, which spans the majority of King’s life, from 1938 to 1968. While parts of the story are well-known to many Americans, Tappin, who is British, knew very few details about King’s life or the civil rights movement before coming to Atlanta in 2004. Writing the script and music took a lot of research.

“I sat down one on one and asked [Atlantans] to tell me, ‘What was going on in your life at this particular time in history?’” says Tappin. “’What were you doing? What were you feeling?’ ... Those questions began to unpack the story for me.”

These firsthand accounts, Tappin says, helped him show the human emotions of King and those around him. Similarly, Demetria McKinney, best known as Janine on “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne,” dug beneath the surface to connect with her role as Coretta Scott King.

“Just looking at the biography and pictures, a lot of the pictures she has with [King] say so much that I really hadn’t paid attention to as a younger girl,” McKinney says. “I’m Googling her, I’m watching how she poised herself, I’m watching that she didn’t cry when anything else would have brought me to tears.”

Studying documents and videos helped the actors understand their characters, but Quentin Earl Darrington, who plays King, says they couldn’t rely on recordings alone to tell the complete story.

“There’s many things that we don’t know, and that’s where you have to fill in the gaps,” he says. “We had a chance to talk to the family to see who the man was at home sitting on the living room sofa. … Then I had to reach in and see my own personal experiences to see if any things were similar, and just fill in the gaps from there.”

Many in the audience who are old enough to remember King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech will likely view the show’s depiction of that pivotal moment through their own personal experience.    

“Everybody has something in their heart … their own attachment [to] the words that came from Dr. King on that great day,” Darrington says. “What we focus on [in “I Dream”] is something that is not thought of as much … what was the behind the speech altogether, how it came about, and why was it written.”

The goal, says Tappin, is to help the audience to see how King’s actions affected history.

“We have a perspective now that is very different from the perspective in 1968, when Martin Luther King and others like him were looking forward to something, in a prophetic sense almost,” Tappin says. “A little over 40 years later, you have an African-American president. So you’re able to look back on the events of history with a greater sense of hope than I think has ever been possible.”

Hope weaves its way to tragedy at the end of the production, as the audience awaits that fateful moment on a motel balcony in Memphis when King lost his life. Tappin found himself considering leaving it out, or ending the show before the scene, a suggestion for which he admits “they called me crazy.”

To balance the inevitable tragedy, his characters find fulfillment in what they’ve accomplished together. And while “I Dream” tells King’s story in a new way and for a different era, the end result is as affirming and uplifting as ever.

“The inspiration and the goal of the movement have to be seen, because we want people to be inspired by the courage of these people,” says director Jasmine Guy. “They were just regular people that did extraordinary things.” SP