There’s only one set required for TheatreSquared’s production of The Mountaintop by Katori Hall—but it’s one that carries a hefty emotional weight. The play reimagines the story of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last hours on Earth, taking place entirely inside King’s room at Memphis’ Lorraine Motel the night before he was assassinated on the motel balcony. Today, the Lorraine Motel is part of the Memphis’ National Civil Rights Museum, its Room 306 forever frozen on April 4, 1968 to honor the memory of the iconic civil rights leader.

If you’re familiar with Room 306 through the myriad articles, books and television shows produced since the assassination, walking through the doors of TheatreSquared’s West Theatre for a performance of The Mountaintop might take your breath away. Due to the painstakingly detailed work by Scenic Designer Tanya Orellana and Props Manager Brodie Jasch and their teams, the set is an exact replica of King’s room—down to the smudges of grime on the wall and the well-worn traffic pattern in the carpet.

Memphis’ National Civil Rights Museum has recreated Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel — today, it’s appears just as it looked on the April 4, 1969, the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

“It’s perfect when you have a show that really fits squarely in T2’s wheelhouse and allows us to pay really close attention to all the little details, all the intricacies that really put the audience there, at that moment in time,” says Jasch. “That’s huge—bringing the audience into a world of something so powerful. It’s the reason we do this job; having a piece of this magnitude is just the icing on the cake of what makes theater great.”

T2’s design team on the project also included Costume Designer Ruby Kemph, Lighting Designer Shawn D. Irish, Sound Designer Bill Toles, Projection Designer CJ Barnwell and Stage Manager Emely Zepeda; with their combined commitment and skill, T2’s production of The Mountaintop was period-perfect from the stage to the rafters.

As Property Manager, Jasch reads each script that T2 stages very closely, with a keen eye for detail. It’s his job to log every time a character picks up a glass, sits on a specific chair, smokes a certain kind of cigarette, or exists in a specific time period.

Properties Manager Brodie Jasch, Props Assistant Emily Davis, and Production Technician Sophia deGuzman built many of the parts and pieces of set dressing for The Mountaintop — like these headboards, direct replicas of the ones found in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

“I attack every script with a Sharpie—it’s filled with color by the time I’m finished with it,” says Jasch with a laugh. “And ‘props’ isn’t just hand props. It’s furniture, special effects, whatever characters are eating, whatever they have in their hands. Essentially, it’s whatever the actor interacts with. We’re interior directors and magic makers.”

Jasch brought an intense level of research to The Mountaintop, spurred on by a desire to recreate Room 306’s setting as realistically as possible. He was finding a lot of amateur photos of the room online, taken by visitors to the National Civil Rights Museum, but most of them were dark or marred by a glare reflected off the Plexiglass installed around the exhibit. He wasn’t able to see the small details that he was craving. But one of the articles he found gave him a solution: Within the last decade, the article said, a photographer was allowed 24-hour access to the room, behind the Plexiglass.

The cushions on this chair are a match for the chair seen in a photo of Dr. King and his team working in Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel.

“He was able to take close ups of everything—the bed, what the sheets looked like, what the newspaper looked like, what the furniture looked like,” says Jasch. “He got to go into the corners, to see how grimy the room was, and were there water stains on the ceiling? And he took pictures of everything.”

After more research, Jasch found out that this mysterious photographer was none other than David Gallo, set designer for the 2011 Broadway production of The Mountaintop. When Jasch wrote to ask if he could borrow Gallo’s research, the designer agreed.

“That’s a really cool part of the community—it doesn’t matter how high up in the business you are, you still work with people in a regional theater, even if you’re on Broadway,” says Jasch.

Once armed with what, essentially, was a shopping list to create Room 306 on stage, Jasch and his team—Emily Davis and Sophia de Guzman—got to work. They had quite a job ahead of them. They were recreating a 60-year old room. Despite culture’s current fascination with all things mid-century and retro, many of the items they needed couldn’t be purchased. The hard-working team built the room’s matching headboards—Jasch says they are identical to the Lorraine versions, down to the type of wood—and Davis carefully recreated the matching bedspreads with their hand-stitched adornments, hundreds of small circles hand-sewn or glued on. The box spring on the bed was recovered in a blue floral fabric that closely resembles the bed in which King spent his last night. Jasch says that the fabric rarely shows—it’s usually covered by the spreads—but that’s the kind of details that sets this design apart.

“Those are some of the fun things that we get to pay attention to, and it’s those small details that make this job fantastic—being able to put the time and effort into the things that are kind of like an Easter egg for audiences,” says Jasch.

The team also built, from scratch, the period-perfect lamp in the room, and de Guzman sewed the cushions for the side chair—a detail that Jasch says the museum got wrong. The T2 version is almost identical to one shown in photographs of King working with others in the room.

The sheer range of what Jasch and his team built—from sewing to construction to electrical projects—is a true testament to how wildly flexible a props manager must be and the huge skill set required.

“Sophia and Emily were invaluable to helping make all of this happen,” he notes. They both have strong backgrounds in carpentry and sewing and pretty much anything else that makes you a props person. If they’re missing a skill, they’re learning it. The props world is kind of like a personality—you always want to be learning something. You don’t ever say, ‘I have the skill set, and I know how to do everything.’ That’s not the job in this industry.

“It’s a little like we’re mad scientists,” he chuckles.

Behind the Scenes of a Picture-Perfect Set