CAMBRIDGE — As a boy growing up in Brooklyn, Najee A. Brown was asked to portray Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a fourth-grade play. Decades later, he directed the premiere of his own play, “Stokely and Martin,” in a virtual version for Portsmouth’s Seacoast Repertory Theatre during the pandemic.
Once again, he played Dr. King.
“It was a full-circle moment,” he said recently.
This weekend, the Multicultural Arts Center in Cambridge brings back “Stokely and Martin” for three pshows, this time in live performance. The play imagines a 1967 conversation between Dr. King and Stokely Carmichael, the Trinidadian-American activist who was a key figure in the Black Power movement and, later, a voice for Pan-Africanism.
As they did during the 1960s, in the play, the two men represent clashing opinions about the strategic direction of the civil rights movement. Carmichael, played by Darren Paul, disagrees with the strictly Gandhian nonviolent tactics that Dr. King (Stetson Marshall) requires of his followers.
“Black power fights white supremacy by taking pride and being empowered by something they used to hold us back,” as Carmichael says in the script.
Yet despite their differences of opinion, their closed-door meeting (as Brown conceives it) adds plenty of nuance to the oft-told story of the civil rights era. In the company of two organizers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Cleveland Sellers (played by Joshua Lee Robinson) and Willie Ricks (played by Terral Arjuna Ainooson), as well as Coretta Scott King (Simone Alyse Senibaldi), King and Carmichael agree to disagree.
But they also agree that the movement needs both of their stylistic approaches — both King’s pacifism and Carmichael’s more fiery demands.
“Nonviolence was King’s life work,” said Brown, on Zoom with Marshall in early January. “His center is dedicated to studying nonviolent protest. And Stokely was not for nonviolence.
“But they were able to sit down and say, ‘We’re gonna move toward this together, whether we like what each other is saying — whether we agree on each other’s North Stars or not.’”
In the play, King asks Carmichael to explain what exactly he means by the phrase “Black Power.”
“I would not have chosen that term,” King says diplomatically in the show.
Carmichael, who was associated with the Black Panther Party, was often described as “militant” during his years in the national spotlight.
“‘Militant’ back then is what ‘woke’ is today,” said Brown. “It’s a word we use to write people off when they’re actually probably saying something we just don’t want to hear.
“It’s almost like you’re calling them a terrorist,” he added, “and there’s that whole thing of ‘I cannot negotiate with a terrorist.’”
But negotiation is at the heart of the imaginary conversation in “Stokely and Martin.” Brown developed the play after watching a lengthy archival interview with Sellers, an outtake from the Emmy-winning 2018 HBO documentary “King in the Wilderness.”
Marshall, a Chicago native, chairs the board of Boston’s Theater Offensive. In October, he was also named to the board of directors for the Chicago Philharmonic.
“For me, when all else fails, art is there,” he said. “I see art as the catalyst for change across everything, regardless of the medium — whether it’s print, paint, the stage, or the TV.”
Portraying Dr. King is “a huge responsibility, and an honor,” he said.
“I love the stage, and I love to be in front of the camera, but if there’s not some historical or cultural reference behind it, I’m not all that interested.”
All of Brown’s work to date as a playwright has been rooted in the struggle for social justice. During the pandemic, he debuted his play “The Bus Stop” at a Baha’i center of learning in Eliot, Maine. He recruited some non-actors — “a woman who worked at the coffee shop, a local dance teacher” — to play five Black women who meet en route to a penitentiary, where each one has a partner who is incarcerated.
That performance drew an audience that included police officers and a public prosecutor. The latter told Brown that the play made him think twice about the impact his work has on the families of the accused.
“That’s the power of theater,” said Brown.
Coincidentally, the Multicultural Arts Center, where Brown serves as artistic director, resides in a historic building in East Cambridge that served as the Middlesex County Courthouse from 1816 until its restoration in the 1980s.
“I believe that art serves three purposes,” Brown said. “To educate the mind, to stir the heart, and to motivate the world toward change.
“I’ve never written anything happy before,” he noted with a dry laugh. Watching his cast rehearse the evening before the interview, he said, “I was about to start crying, as if I didn’t know what was about to be said.”
“Stokely and Martin” features several interludes with socially conscious songs from the period — “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud,” “We Shall Overcome,” “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Some are sung by the cast; others are amplified from a record player on the set.
“Music is instrumental in everything I do, personally,” said Marshall. “I’m a lyrics guy. I want to know exactly what it is you’re saying, and why you’re saying it.”
For Brown, the most important message of his play is the fact that social activism takes hard work.
“These are not just people who acted out of emotion, acting because someone died and they went and protested,” he said. “Which is not a critique on the way that the world is operating.
“But in a movement without strategy, you’re just going to be moving in circles, without a goal. These people sat in a room for hours and worked out strategy and vision.
“And then they acted.”
STOKELY AND MARTIN
Written by Najee A. Brown. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. Multicultural Arts Center, 41 2nd St., Cambridge. Tickets $30. multiculturalartscenter.org
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.
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