A King in Darkness

By T.E.K.

I HAVE A DREAM Conceived and Directed by ROBERT GREENWALD Adapted by JOSH GREENFELD

A persistent fallacy in the theater is to imagine that because a man has lived a highly dramatic life, the intrinsic excitement of that life can be transferred automatically to the stage. The fallacy is compounded if the man involved has exercised a visible impact on the history of his times. Supposedly, this ought to confer heroic stature on him. It rarely works that way, and I Have a Dream, a documentary series of vignettes based on the life and words of Martin Luther King fails because the drama has internal laws that transcend the most memorable of headlines.

One of those laws is surprise. Unless the playwright indulges in revisionist history, the element of surprise is missing. Rolf Hockhuth's argument in The Deputy that Pope Pius XII bore a greater responsibility than Hitler for the deaths of 6 million Jews was distinctly surprising, and while it failed to convince, it certainly contributed to the success of the play. No such element of surprise exists in I Have a Dream and Billy Dee Williams' performance has a snake oil slickness that robs it of the craggy integrity that Hal Holbrook brought to Mark Twain, or Henry Fonda to Clarence Darrow. The idea of having a character who is seemingly Coretta King (Judyann Elder), deliver lengthy asides on the ideals of King violates another internal law of drama: never explain -- always reveal.

Dream has two significant things to tell us. One concerns the immutable American commitment to democracy.

Once the black ceased to be "the invisible man," in Novelist Ralph Ellison's famous phrase, the vast majority of Americans moved to right the inequalities to which blacks had been subjected.

The other significant feature of Dream is to remind us of how deeply Christianity is ingrained in the spirit of U.S. blacks. The songs of the Gospel are the most moving and powerful moments in the play. Among Southern whites, themselves steeped in the Christian tradition, the principle that every soul is equal in the sight of God produced an in exorable momentum toward progress in desegregation. While I Have a Dream is negligible as drama, it is very bracing as a lesson on how U.S. democracy works.

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