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Katori Hall’s new drama studies life in a nightmarish housing project

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

OFF BROADWAY REVIEW

Katori Hall’s recent Broadway play “The Mountaintop,” regarding an encounter between Martin Luther King and an angel disguised as a hotel chambermaid, was a fantasy with an inspirational message.

In startling contrast, the playwright’s latest work, “Hurt Village” offers a bleak, gritty look at life among some residents of a decaying housing project in modern-day Memphis.

Talk about going from the top to the bottom of the African-American experience.

Opening on Monday at the Pershing Square Signature Theatre Center, the despairing message of “Hurt Village” is how there is little future for people existing in such dead-end circumstances.

Spanning two weeks in summer, the story is set in motion when Buggy (Corey Hawkins) unexpectedly returns home from ten years of military service with a dishonorable discharge and no prospects. Buggy reluctantly returns to selling crack with his friend Cornbread (Nicholas Christopher), which inevitably leads to conflict with the neighborhood’s reigning drug dealer (Ron Cephas Jones).

Buggy’s imaginative 13-year-old daughter Cookie (Joaquina Kalukango) is being raised by his resentful former girlfriend (Marsha Stephanie Blake) and his cantankerous grandmother (Tonya Pinkins) who holds down a subsistence job. Their hardscrabble lives – and those of several other characters in the chaotic community -- are affected by Buggy’s attempt to get his family out of their mean environs.

Suggesting a contemporary equivalent of “The Lower Depths,” the naturalistic two-act drama is grim indeed and yet manages to scrape up a faint hope that young Cookie can manage to escape this world.

Although the story is sorrowful, the play is streaked with humor and marked by Hall’s realistic yet subtly heightened dialogue, which mixes regional slang and Southern hip-hop rhythms. If this language often is exceedingly foul, it nonetheless sounds pungent and authentic.

Still, it is a pity that Patricia McGregor, who sensitively directs Signature’s premiere, could not convince Hall to trim the overlong play, which runs two hours and 30 minutes. Such misery is not easy to endure -- but perhaps that’s the playwright’s intent.