We are taught in history about the stories of legends. We construct in our minds what we think they were like. We in a way place them on a pedestal. Oddly enough as a result, it can be disappointing to learn something about them that we believe to be beneath them. However, I think what The Mountaintop taught me was that those legends that we look up to are all just humans. I guess when we imagined their lives, we didn’t actually imagine their lives. We imagined a figure, a hero. We didn’t picture them washing dishes, or complaining about their long day of work, we never really saw them as one of us. But in doing so, we lost some of the magic.

It was off putting at first I think to see Martin Luther Kind Jr. as someone who was tired of it all, who felt lost in many ways, who could smoke, drink, swear, and cheat on his wife. None of these things were from my childhood imagination. But as the play went on, I appreciated it more. It made what he did somewhat more magical in a way. Seeing him as a man and only a man who could then stand on the mountaintop and see the stories of history play before his eyes, it hit me of the impact that a person could make. He wasn’t some mystical being that was perfect or untouchable but rather an ordinary figure who had to deal with all the same emotions that we all have to deal with. He felt the same dilemmas that we all have to face.

The Mountaintop was so poignant because it provided us an insight into a legend but also into all legends of history. It was also powerful in the boundaries that it pushed. I loved that it made God a black, woman and an angel a prostitute who drank, swore, and didn’t care what any man thought of her. This play made me re-imagine not only the past and those who lived in it but also, how I see the present. The play was emotionally moving and didn’t allow any of society’s “rules” to govern the way it imagined the world, thereby allowing me to not let society’s “rules” govern the way I imagined the world.