The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and “P–Valley” creator finds inspiration in the lives of her family members, flawed historical figures, and her own experiences.
Words by Kelundra Smith | Photos by Lynsey Weatherspoon
November 15, 2022
Katori Hall grew up knowing she was supposed to be a billionaire. Her maternal grandmother, whom she affectionately called Big Mama, often told her grandchildren the story of how they were robbed of a fortune. Big Mama grew up in Panola County, Texas, where her family owned several acres of land. One day, when Big Mama was around 15 years old, a surveyor visited and found oil beneath the soil. She thought they were going to be rich.
However, after years of legal battles, the court ruled that the family owned the land but not the mineral rights to the oil beneath it. This is a relatively common scenario, but the extremely low royalty her family received is abnormal. Typically, after the owner of the mineral rights takes their cut and production costs and taxes are taken out, the landowner earns a percentage of the gross production of oil on their land. By the time the matter was settled, Hall says, her family received less than a tenth of a percent of the money made from a barrel.
“A lot of times Black folks don’t like to talk about the things we’ve been through because there’s so much trauma, but I think Big Mama would impart lessons on us because of that trauma,” Hall says. “For years, my grandmother would get these royalty checks that she refused to cash because it wouldn’t even add up to a penny if she cashed 10 of them. That story was so defining for us as a family.” As a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and celebrated screenwriter, her work gives ordinary working-class people the dominion her family lost with those mineral rights.
Hearing her mother and grandmother tell stories taught Hall to use everything from her life as grist for the writer’s mill. The first time she went to her hometown strip club, Pure Passion in Memphis, she was around 16 years old and snuck in with a fake ID. She says the beauty, athleticism, and sexual freedom she saw in the women were imprinted on her mind and influenced her creation of The Pynk, the fictional club in her television series, “P-Valley.”
Now in its second season, “P-Valley” centers on the dancers at The Pynk who are fighting for top billing at the club and for agency in their own lives. The Starz series also features the club proprietor fighting with greedy developers and a local rapper trying to make it big by having his songs go viral in a strip club. The series, based on Hall’s 2015 play “Pussy Valley,” has been lauded for employing women directors exclusively and for its representation of complex queer and nonbinary characters. With Hall’s anomalous vision, the blinged-out strip club becomes a microcosm of America.
“During slavery, many sexual transactions took place on the Black woman’s body,” Hall says. “Being proud and eschewing shame is the greatest revolution I can provide for myself and others. To love my jiggles and my dark skin in ways that white society does not recognize or love, it can be such a liberating thing. The strip club world is a performance of sexual freedom and power. It’s a big ‘fuck you’ to a society that has spent years dehumanizing you.”
In the second season of “P-Valley,” art imitates reality as the dancers at The Pynk are out of work because of a pandemic and struggling financially, a developer still schemes to take the club, and one of the rappers grapples with secrets from his past.
“I wanted my fiction to feel like the truth,” Hall says. “I wanted people to look at the second season and say they did it better than the history books and The New York Times. They documented how marginalized communities survived the pandemic. I wanted this season to feel like a time capsule.”
Before heading South to the Mississippi Delta for “P-Valley,” Hall cut her teeth in the theater and became one of the most lauded living playwrights, with honors including the Laurence Olivier Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and two Lecomte du Nouy prizes from Lincoln Center, to name a few.
She made her mark with another Southern story, “The Mountaintop,” a reimagining of the last night of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life. In the play, King is ushered through his final hours by a hotel maid named Camae. Hall found the inspiration for the script close to home. Her mother, Carrie Mae, for whom she named the maid, lived down the street from the Lorraine Motel and wanted to hear King speak at the Mason Temple that fateful night in 1968, but was kept from going.
“That impacts a person, when your everyday life is the history of a nation, of a people,” Hall says. “My mom would regale us with the goings-on of her day. She was always the protagonist of her own movie, and she has always lived her life in that way.”
“To be in the room with the actors experiencing this fake thing that feels so real. To me, it’s a form of magic. It’s church.” — Katori Hall
In the play, Hall doesn’t portray King as a saint but as a fully formed and flawed man. He smokes cigarettes, curses, flirts with Camae, and constantly checks the phone for wiretaps. When the play premiered on Broadway in 2011, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett, it was met with mixed reviews about its portrayal of King.
For The New York Times, critic Ben Brantley wrote, “ … [T]he play’s central gimmick (for that is what it is) is Ms. Hall’s attempt to bridge the confounding gap between the mortal and immortal that is part of our perception of historically great men and women.”
But The Amsterdam News, New York’s oldest Black newspaper, described the play as a “tour de force filled with humor, human frailty, and the personal struggles that the leader of a movement faces.”
For Hall, the play is about showing future generations that leadership doesn’t require perfection. “Good leadership requires a level of imperfection, grit, wounds, and scars,” Hall says. “In his imperfection, it provides this beautiful lesson on how it takes a human being, not a saint, to change the world.”
In many ways, Hall’s characters resemble fairy tale protagonists. She amplifies the experiences of Black people who have been ignored or mistreated and gives them a heroic journey. In her first play, “Hoodoo Love,” a Memphis lounge singer seeks a love potion from a roots woman without considering the consequences. In “Hurt Village,” a family moving out of a Memphis housing project tries to repair relationships after the father comes home from a tour in Iraq. And in her first musical, Hall honored the life of one of Tennessee’s brightest stars, Tina Turner.
As a public figure, Turner's life has been covered not just in the tabloids but also in two autobiographies and the 1993 biopic “What's Love Got to Do With It?”. However, when Hall met with Turner, she looked for the untold story and found an unlikely hero’s journey. At the beginning of “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” the title character, a naïve church girl in Nutbush, Tennessee, is eventually swept up by the music industry and an older man. By the end, she transcends her circumstances as a free woman in charge of her destiny.
“I love what we did with the song ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’ in the musical,” Hall says. “We show her trying to find heroes outside of herself, but she finds the she-ro is inside of her.”
Hall has found her inner she-ro in many ways. As a wife with three children, she has defied the odds for women in theater and television, who often lose work due to motherhood. The Lillys, an organization geared toward supporting women in theater, publishes a survey every few years called The Count that explores the demographic makeup of plays produced in the U.S. The Count 3.0 revealed that only 20% of plays produced in the country were by people of color. So when Hall renegotiated her deal with Lionsgate for “P-Valley,” she asked them to include funding for Black playwrights in her contract. She recalls that she made around $3,000 for writing the stage version of “Pussy Valley,” which took about six years to finish.
“I wanted to use my power to carve out space, time, and resources for playwrights who are easily discouraged because they are Black or women and they’re writing about certain things,” Hall says. “It’s a great way to pour resources into people who have historically not been supported by theater.”
In 2023, Hall will make a much-anticipated return to theater with her 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “The Hot Wing King.” To be staged at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, with Hall making her directorial debut, “Hot Wing” was previously mounted at New York’s Signature Theatre in early 2020 before its run was cut short by the pandemic. In the play, Cordell and his boyfriend, Dwayne, are preparing for the annual Hot Wang Festival in Memphis when an unexpected visit from Dwayne’s nephew sends his plans to enter the hot wing king competition and his relationship into a tailspin. Hall’s voice permeates the script, with Southern and snap queen slang. Inspired by her brother’s and his partner’s struggles as gay Black men in the South, she hopes she can be an ally and that the play sheds light on people whose stories often go untold in theater.
“There’s nothing like a story of witness,” Hall says. “To be in the room with the actors experiencing this fake thing that feels so real. To me, it’s a form of magic. It’s church. I will always go back to the theater in all of its forms. I can’t get enough of the live experience.”
Kelundra Smith is a playwright, theater critic, and arts journalist whose mission is to connect people to cultural experiences and each other. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, Food & Wine, American Theatre, and elsewhere. She is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. She also teaches workshops about addressing cultural identity in cultural criticism at theaters and universities across the country. Follow her on Instagram @anotherpieceofkay for musings on life, art and everything else.
Lynsey Weatherspoon is a portrait and editorial photographer based in both Atlanta and Birmingham. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, NPR, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time, ESPN, and ESPN-owned The Undefeated. Her work has been exhibited at the African American Museum in Philadelphia and Photoville NYC.
Natasha Nyanin: Styling; Sam Autumn: Hair; Kristi Jones: Makeup
