Pulitzer Prize Winner Katori Hall: I think theater is a church. It’s a haven ‘|’ Stage

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One afternoon in mid-June, playwright Katori Hall looked at her phone. A text came from a former agent. You read “Oh my God.” Hall was confused. Then her current agent phoned, telling her that she had just won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

“And I said, ‘What?!'” Hall remembers. “I started screaming and running in circles in my house.” Her young son was less affected. “It was like, ‘Mom, be quiet. I’m looking at YouTube.'”

Pulitzer’s dramatic forecast has been a bit choppy this year. With nearly all theaters closed since March, a play was as likely to come online as anywhere else, and few could guess which works the winners would be rewarded. But the board ultimately chose Hall’s play The Hot Wing King, which the quote describes as “a funny look and a deep sense of black masculinity and how it is perceived, filtered through the experiences of the loving gay couple and their extended family as they prepare for the culinary competition.” (The runners-up included Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley’s Circle Jerk, an online show, and Zora Howard Stowe, who had a ground tour off Broadway this past February.) Hall wrote the play in honor of her brother; You’ve never seen a story like his on stage before. “When I saw him navigate the southern world as a gay black man, I always wanted to tell a version of his story,” she says.

Pandemic Award Winner… The Hot Wing King. Photography: Monique Carboni/AFP

Hall spoke via video call from Atlanta, where she is filming the second season of her P-Valley TV series, saying she didn’t have much time to savor the honor. “For a lovely moment, on a Friday afternoon, I thoroughly enjoyed the glee,” she says. “But after five minutes, I had to reach Zoom for the casting session.” The next day, a friend brought a crystal bottle. Hall fell asleep before she drank a drop.

Like many playwrights, Hall was an actor first. And she probably would never have written had it not been for a spectacle class at Columbia University. She and her colleague, actress Kelly McCreary, are sent to the library, tasked with creating a landscape of two young women of color. “We couldn’t find shit,” recalls the 40-year-old. They went back to their teacher and asked for suggestions. The coach was confused.

Later, Hall discovered that there was a body of work that he had written and for women of color. But in the classroom, she had an advertisement. “I was like, ‘I’m going to have to write those plays,'” she says. “I was so fond of this desire to put plays on the shelf which was a direct reflection of me.”

In her twenties, Hall continued to act, earning a master’s degree from American Repertory Theatre, but also began writing more seriously. Accepted into Juilliard’s playwriting program, she studied with Christopher Durange and Marsha Norman, developing a body of work set primarily on and around Beale Street in and around Memphis, near where she grew up.

Branching out…the hall is on the set of her TV show P-Valley. Photography: Tina Rudin

The plays that appeared were largely naturalistic, though tinged with magical realism. Similar in some ways to August Wilson’s Pittsburgh cycle, her dramas have an earthy, humorous feel, a feminine vision, and a luxuriant language that is so vividly felt. “I thought in poetic inclinations and rhetoric / That my mind holds more words / Than the greatest dictionary could ever find,” says one of the characters in the drama Hurt Village, set in a volatile housing project. This sounds like Hole, too.

Success came early. A production of The Mountaintop, a gentle, spiky fantasy about the last night of Martin Luther King’s life, opened above a London pub in 2009, the same year he completed Hall Juilliard. It moved to the West End and won the Olivier Award for Best New Play, a first for a black woman. Mountaintop then hit Broadway, with Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett in the cast. In the US, it was met with a more muted critical reaction, particularly from white male reviewers, though it still got its investment back – a rarity on Broadway.

“Technically, I was doing things that I felt were very true to my impulses,” Hall says. “I was actually really frustrated because what I was doing didn’t feel respected the way I knew it should have been.”

Prestigious productions followed, as did more awards and a residency at New York’s Signature Theater. However, critical response to its work has remained mixed. “If you were afraid of a certain type of black person, you would say to them, ‘I don’t know, this play…I don’t understand it,'” she says. “I found that New York audiences could approach Southern stories and characters, especially black ones, with elitist attitudes, She wishes New York theaters could do more to develop diverse audiences, who would laugh with their characters, not at their own. But she never changed her stories to accommodate the majority of white audiences. Her goal? “I want to put you in the room with people you wouldn’t invite into your house.”

Powerful heights…Angela Bassett and Samuel L. Jackson at the top of the mountain…Photo: Sarah Krulwich/The New York Times

Then again, her biggest success – financially at least – came from the story of a woman almost anyone would call her. Hall has written a book for Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, which will reopen in the West End on July 28 and on Broadway on October 8. It was Hall’s first musical, though the music somehow overwhelms all of her work.

Biographical limitations, and big-budget musicals may feel restrictive for some writers. But this wasn’t Hall’s experience, thanks in large part to Turner herself. “Tina didn’t really want a sanitized version of her life,” Hall says. “She wanted grit. She wanted to show the cost and emotional cost of what she went through. And I was like, ‘Oh, I got you girl. That’s me. I can have the truth all day.'”

Hall didn’t find the Broadway version playing much differently than the West End version, though she admitted she did a better job of attracting black ticket buyers. “I love the fact that our black actors and actresses got the chance to look at the audience and see themselves reflected again,” she says.

She thinks this is especially important to Adrian Warren, who received a Tony nomination for her role as Tina. “She gets a shock every night,” Hall says. “It hurts for her. To be able to see that you’re not performing a black shock in front of a whole sea of ​​white faces is better and safer for the performers.”

Her desire to diversify her audience led her to turn to television, a medium she knew could reach black viewers more easily. P-Valley, adapted from one of her plays, is set in Pynk, a black-owned high-heeled strip club in the Mississippi Delta. Without caution or apology, it focuses on the women working there, tracing their lives on and off the pole. The Guardian reviewer wrote: “As told almost entirely by black and idyllic characters, it’s one of the best new TV series of the year.”

Simply the Best… Adrian Warren as Tina Turner. Photo: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Although she tasted the broader influence of television and its financial rewards, Hall did not abandon the stage. “I think of theater as a church. It is a sanctuary.” “To be able to put these characters in a room where they’re breathing the same air, it feels real — sometimes more real than TV.” And she thinks it could be more transformative, too. “There is something about theatrical experience that attaches itself to your mind and heart in ways that television necessarily cannot.”

Hall wants to produce a play every year, although the pandemic, which she has spent with her young children, has slowed her productivity somewhat. Her work is based on finding a quiet place to hear the voices of her characters. “There is no silence because I am at home with children,” she says.

But theater has seen its own kind of silence in the past year, which begins as an account of what art is like and who will create, watch and benefit from it. Hall finds that not much has changed yet, certainly not enough.

“The fact that most white men are running the show is wrong,” she says. “We can use our imaginations to think about anything, in any world, yet in theater we are sometimes a stronger representation of white supremacy than some white supremacist.” However, she still hopes for a fairer and fairer theater – one that invites everyone home.

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