One afternoon in mid-June, the playwright Katori Hall glanced at her phone. A text had come in from a former agent. “OMG,” it read. Hall was confused. Then her current agent phoned, telling her she had just won this year’s Pulitzer prize for drama.
“And I was like, ‘Whaaat?!’” Hall recalls. “I started screaming and running around in circles in my house.” Her young son was less impressed. “He was like, ‘Mom, be quiet. I’m looking at YouTube.’”
Predictions for the drama Pulitzer went a little wonky this year. With nearly all theatres shut since March, a play was as likely to appear online as anywhere else and few could guess which works the prizegivers would reward. But the board ultimately chose Hall’s play The Hot Wing King, which the citation described as “a funny, deeply felt consideration of Black masculinity and how it is perceived, filtered through the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family as they prepare for a culinary competition”. (The runners-up included Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley’s Circle Jerk, an online show, and Zora Howard’s Stew, which had a terrestrial run off-Broadway last February.) Hall had written the play as a tribute to her brother; she had never seen a story like his on stage before. “Seeing him navigate the southern world as a gay Black man, I have always wanted to tell some version of his story,” she says.
Speaking by video call from Atlanta, where she is shooting the second season of her television series P-Valley, Hall says she didn’t have much time to savour the honour. “For a beautiful moment, on a Friday afternoon, I got to just like burst with joy,” she says. “But five minutes later, I had to get to Zoom for a casting session.” The next day, a friend brought over a bottle of Cristal. Hall fell asleep before she could drink a drop.
Like many playwrights, Hall was an actor first. And she might never have written had it not been for a scene study class at Columbia University. She and a classmate, the actor Kelly McCreary, were sent to the library, tasked with finding a naturalistic scene for two young women of colour. “We couldn’t find shit,” the 40-year-old recalls. They went back to their teacher and asked for suggestions. The instructor was equally stumped.
Later, Hall would discover that a body of work written by and for women of colour did exist. But in the classroom, she had a revelation. “I was like, ‘I will have to write those plays, then,’” she says. “I was just infused with this desire to put plays on the shelf that were a direct reflection of me.”
In her 20s, Hall continued to act, earning a master’s from the American Repertory Theater, but she also began writing more seriously. Accepted on to Juilliard’s playwriting programme, she studied with Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman, developing a body of work set mainly in and around Memphis’s Beale Street, near where she grew up.
The plays that emerged were largely naturalistic, though veined with magical realism. Similar in some ways to August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, her dramas have an earthiness, a humour, a female vision and a luxuriant language that feels distinctly her own. A character in her drama Hurt Village, set in a volatile housing project, says: “I thought in poetic slants, diatribes / That my mind held more words / Than the largest dictionary could ever find.” That sounds like Hall, too.
Success came early. A production of The Mountaintop, a gentle and barbed fantasy about the last night of Martin Luther King’s life, opened above a London pub in 2009, the same year Hall completed Juilliard. It transferred to the West End and won the Olivier award for best new play, the first for a Black woman. The Mountaintop then arrived on 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 recouped its investment – a Broadway rarity.
“Artistically, I was doing things that I felt were so true to my impulses,” Hall says. “I actually felt very frustrated that what I was doing did not feel like it was being respected in the way that I knew it should have been.”
Prestigious productions followed, as did more awards and a residency at New York’s Signature Theatre. Yet the critical response to her work remained mixed. “If you are scared of a certain type of Black person, you’re going to be like, ‘I don’t know, this play … I don’t understand it,’” she says. She finds that New York audiences can approach southern stories and characters, particularly Black characters, with elitist attitudes and she wishes that New York theatres would do more to develop diverse audiences, who will laugh with, not at, her characters. But she has never altered her stories to accommodate a majority white audience. Her goal? “I want to put you in the room with people you would never have invited into your own home.”
Then again, her greatest success – in financial terms at least – has come from the story of a woman whom almost anyone would invite in. Hall wrote the book for Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, which will reopen in the West End on 28 July and on Broadway on 8 October. It was Hall’s first musical, though music infuses all of her work in one way or another.
The strictures of a biographical, big-budget jukebox musical might feel constraining to some writers. But that wasn’t Hall’s experience, largely thanks to Turner herself. “Tina really did not want a sanitised version of her life,” Hall says. “She wanted the grit. She wanted to show the cost, the emotional cost, of what she went through. And I was like, ‘Ooh, I got you girl. That’s me. I can get you truth all day.’”
Hall hasn’t found that the Broadway version plays much differently from the West End one, though she acknowledges that it has done a better job in attracting Black ticket buyers. “I love the fact that our Black actors and actresses got a chance to kind of look into the audience and see themselves reflected back,” she says.
She believes that is particularly important for Adrienne Warren, who received a Tony nomination for her turn as Tina. “She’s performing trauma every night,” Hall says. “It’s traumatic for her. To be able to see that you’re not performing Black trauma in front of a complete sea of white faces, that’s better and safer for the performers.”
Her desire to diversify her audience spurred her move to television, a medium where she knew she could more easily reach Black viewers. P-Valley, an adaptation of one of her plays, is set in the Pynk, a Black-owned, down-at-stiletto-heel strip club in the Mississippi Delta. Without prurience or apology, it focuses on the women who work there, tracing their lives on and off the pole. “As told almost entirely by black female and queer characters, it’s one of the year’s best new television series,” the Guardian’s reviewer wrote.
Though she has tasted the broader influence of television and its financial rewards, Hall hasn’t abandoned theatre. “I think of theatre as a church. It’s a sanctuary,” she says. “To be able to put these characters in a room where you’re breathing the same air, it feels so real – more real sometimes than TV.” And she believes it can be more transformative, too. “There’s something about a theatrical experience that attaches itself on your mind and on your heart in ways that TV can’t necessarily do.”
Hall wants to have a play produced every year, although the pandemic, which she spent with her young children, has slowed her productivity somewhat. Her work depends on her finding a quiet place to hear the voices of her characters. “There’s no silence because I’m at home with kids,” she says.
But theatre has experienced its own kind of silence in the past year, which has begun a reckoning with what the art form is and who gets to create it, witness it, profit from it. Hall feels that not much has changed so far, certainly not enough.
“The fact that still mostly white men are running the show, that’s wrong,” she says. “We can use our imaginations to think of anything, any world, and yet in the theatre sometimes we’re a more staunch representation of white supremacy than even some white supremacists are.” And yet, she still hopes for a fairer and more just theatre – a theatre that invites everyone home.
Tina reopens at the Aldwych theatre, London, on 28 July.
