In one of the terrible ironies of history, black activist Malcolm X was assassinated just as he was starting to espouse the possibility of world brotherhood through his Organization of Afro-American Unity. His murderers were members of the Nation of Islam, the Muslim cult that had formed Malcolm’s vision and from which he was estranged after a philosophical and political rupture.
Jeff Stetson’s affecting 1984 one-act The Meeting imagines Malcolm, 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 the conceptualized conversation. Director Jacqui Parker has brought the play to life in a joint project of Lyric West Theatre Company and Our Place Theater Project.
The action takes place in the Harlem Hotel, where Malcolm 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 has asked 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."
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’s. But he counters hatred with love in the symbolic gesture of presenting Malcolm 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.)
The two actors in this production both have previous experience playing their real-life characters. New York–based Michael Green has been portraying King since the age of 10 and has written and performed a one-man show An Evening with King; Patrick Fryday Mitchell has directed and portrayed Malcolm in another production of The Meeting. But Green has a confidence and a charisma that Mitchell can’t match. One can imagine Green exhorting mass rallies and persuading a broad cross-section of society; Mitchell doesn’t seem to have the fierceness, the ferocity, to harangue crowds or to make murderous enemies. Still, the production is worth seeing not only for its sense of history but also for the insight it affords on contemporary struggles for freedom.