`THE MEETING': ABOUT LOVE AND OPPOSING TRUTHS (PLAY REVIEW)

"The Meeting" is a play about love. The love Malcolm X had for his oppressed brothers and sisters, and the love Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had as well for the enemies of his people.

In the end, the love each has for his own family allows the two ideologically-opposed leaders to embrace -- if briefly -- each other as men and fellow warriors in the struggle for civil rights.

The play, the final presentation of the Southeast Missouri State University's Martin Luther King Jr. celebration, drew an audience of about 50 people to Academic Auditorium Thursday night.

~~In reality, "The Meeting" never happened. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King never met each other in a Harlem motel room to talk over their differences. But Jeff Stetson's play and the device of an ongoing arm-wrestling match provide a microcosmic view of the movement's two competing models -- King's Gandhi-inspired nonviolence and Malcolm X's belief in separatism and in achieving freedom, justice and equality "by any means necessary."

Malcolm X gets the better of the exchange if you ask me, maybe because Ersky Freeman has such presence on stage, and maybe because the attacker usually has the advantage.

He is at first chiding, then sarcastic and finally outraged by King's willingness to turn the other cheek and by what the Muslim minister viewed as King's complicity with the white man. "The award (the Nobel Peace Prize) was for getting beaten and not fighting back," Malcolm X says.

As Martin Luther King Jr., Jim Lucas bears a remarkable resemblance to the "King of Love." But the playwright's justification of King's insistence on nonviolence -- and thus Lucas' portrayal -- seems almost wishy-washy when we know King and his followers were anything but in their resistance to violence.

Mark Anderson plays the largely comical role of Rashad, Malcolm X's overprotective bodyguard.

All three are members of the Washington, D.C.-based Pin Points Theatre, currently on a national tour.

Sometimes the one-act play seems mostly a string of aphorisms. "You try to get whites to stop hating us," Malcolm X says, "I try to get us to stop hating ourselves."

But that's appropriate. Both men spoke their own truth.