Katori Hall Plays One: Hoodoo Love; Saturday Night/Sunday Morning; The Mountaintop; Hurt Village

by Katori Hall

An important new voice for African-American theatre, Katori Hall explores the lives of black and often invisible Americans with vivid language, dynamic narratives and richly textured characterisation.

Hoodoo Love is Hall's debut play, a tale of love, magic, jealousy and secrets in 1930s Memphis, written in vivid language which captures the spirit of the Blues.

Saturday Night/Sunday Morning is set in a Memphis beauty shop/boarding house during the final days of WWII. Rich with humor and history, it is a story about friendship and finding love in unexpected places.

Winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Play 2009, The Mountaintop is a historical-fantastical two hander, portraying the penultimate day in the life of Martin Luther King.

Hurt Village won the 2011 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Set in a real-life Memphis housing project, it explores in vivid and at times brutal detail a long-lasting legacy of drug abuse, child abuse, crime, and self-hatred within a poor, working-class, multi-generational Black family.

This first collection of Katori Hall's dramatic works demonstrate her unique voice for the theatre, which is visceral, passionate and energetic. Hall portrays disenfranchised portions of society with fearless humanity and startling accomplishment.

Genres: Plays

447 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 15, 2011

About the author

Katori Hall (born May 10, 1981) is an American playwright, journalist, and actress from Memphis, Tennessee.

Hall graduated from Columbia University in 2003 with a major in African-American Studies and Creative Writing. She was awarded top departmental honors from the university's Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS). In 2005, she graduated from the American Repertory Theater's Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University with a Master of Fine Arts in Acting, and graduated from the Juilliard School's Lila Acheson Wallace playwriting program in 2009.

Her awards include a Susan Smith Blackburn Award, Lark Play Development Center Playwrights of New York (PONY) Fellowship, Kate Neal Kinley Fellowship, two Lecompte du Nouy Prizes from Lincoln Center, Fellowship of Southern Writers Bryan Family Award in Drama, NYFA Fellowship, and the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award. Hall was shortlisted for the London Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award and received the Otis Guernsey New Voices Playwriting Award from the William Inge Theatre Festival. She is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 1999, Hall graduated from Craigmont High School (Memphis, TN) as the first African-American valedictorian.

Hall has been published as a book reviewer, journalist, and essayist in publications such as The Boston Globe, Essence, Newsweek and The New York Times. She has been a Kennedy Center Playwriting Fellow at the O’Neill.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Jim Grimsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katori Hall's plays are marked by such fierce honesty and incandescent writing that they stand head and shoulders above most other plays that I have read, and her voice is among the truest of any I have encountered. The Mountaintop is a study of the last evening of Martin Luther King's life, a metaphysical journey into his final hours, a flight of fantasy that captures the reality of the moment moreso than could any literal rendering of events. The closing pages of the play take such risks and reap intense rewards. Hoodoo Love, her first play, is an enviable debut that points toward the appearance of a special writer, nothing ordinary about her. But Hurt Village is the most spectacular of the pieces, a study of a poor community in Memphis in which every day is a battle to the death among the residents, who are desperate in all their circumstances. The characters are hard to bear and the play terrified my students when I assigned it for their reading. Hall is better known now as the author of Pussy Valley, but these early plays are a clear indicator that there is no part of human life she cannot face head on.

[Charlie Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Just... Wow. There are no words for the amount of talent this writer has. I am so excited to go watch her play The Mountaintop at the Manchester Royal Exchange, but wish I could've seen the original with Samuel L. Jackson as MLK. However, my favourite plays from the collection were Hoodoo Love and Hurt Village, both wonderful social realist plays set in the American South with moments of distilled poetic dialogue.

[Gina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful writing. Katori Hall is a playwright whose unique voice is drawing attention.

[behsforensics]

Cutting is for Saturday Night/Sunday Morning
By Katori Hall

[Adelaide · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my book club pick.

This article got me interesting in Katori Hall's work:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...

I particularly enjoyed The Mountaintop, because the representation of the angel and God were so unexpected for me. It told a story I knew fairly well in a very new way and made MLK Jr. very admirable while still very flawed.

[Gila Gila · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adding this is a bit of a lie - I only read (and saw) Hurt Village. But Holy Gods, I'll never forget it. There is so much raw pain and truth in this play that all this time later it still rises up at me (must read the others).