Theatre in Review: Hurt Village (Pershing Square Signature Center)

The worst thing you can do with a young playwright is rush to judgment. Consider the case of Katori Hall; after she made her Broadway debut last fall with The Mountaintop, a rather too whimsical fantasy about Martin Luther King's last night on earth, I was ready to pigeonhole her as a talented writer afflicted with a penchant for cutesiness and unearned uplift. Well, scratch that: After ten hair-raising minutes of Hurt Village, all my preconceptions were out the window. This is a vivid canvas of ghetto life, bristling with grisly subject matter -- crack addiction, gang warfare, and rape are only the half of it -- expressed in language that scalds the air. It's 100-proof stuff, brought to blood-curdling life by a gifted cast. Her ambition sometimes outstrips her ability to control her material, but Hall is absolutely not to be dismissed.

Hurt Village is an actual housing development in Memphis, Tennessee. Built in the '50s for an all-white constituency, its racial makeup changed after King's 1968 assassination and the subsequent white flight from the city center. By the time the lights come up on Hall's play, it is a burned-out ruin in the tradition of Chicago's Cabrini Green and St. Louis' Pruitt-Igoe. Among the last few residents waiting to be relocated are Cookie, a sassy, gifted 13-year-old who dreams of becoming a rapper; Crank, her mother, a recovering crack addict with hopes of becoming a cosmetologist; and Big Mama, Cookie's grandmother, a prematurely elderly nursing aide who holds her family together through sheer grit.

Also on hand are Toyia, Crank's good friend (they describe each other as "ace boon coons"); Cornbread, the drug dealer whose sexual attentions they share; Ebony and Skillet, a pair of feckless homeboys; and Tony C, the local drug kingpin, who justifies his ghetto crack business as a way of keeping his family safe and in the suburbs.

Two events drive the action of Hurt Village. One is the reappearance, after many years, of Buggy -- who is Big Mama's grandson, Crank's ex-lover, and Cookie's father -- from Iraq. The other is the stunning revelation that Big Mama's salary puts her a few hundred dollars beyond the reach of Section 8 housing assistance; when Hurt Village is closed forever, in two weeks' time, her family may be pushed onto the streets.

The plot device of a home in the suburbs proffered and then withdrawn seems an echo of A Raisin in the Sun, making it the first of two plays this season -- the other being Clybourne Park -- to riff on the Lorraine Hansberry classic. But Hurt Village is loaded with funny and horrifying details that make Hansberry's drama seem almost genteel. "Folks around here are so poor, we can't even afford the 'r' at the end of the word," announces Cookie early on. She may have learned her hard-boiled manner from Big Mama, whose way of greeting Crank is to ask, "Is you back on crack?" Every so often gunshots are heard in the distance, earning nothing more than a wary glance from the people on stage.

Cookie, meanwhile, announces she is on birth control pills, even as she proves to be woefully ignorant about the facts of sexual intercourse. (She's a pretty tough customer, anyway; when anyone urges her to succeed in school, perhaps even go to college, she scornfully asserts that she doesn't want to be "a Huxtable.") Skillet begins Act II with a lengthy essay on the similarities and differences "between weed and pussy." When one of the women gets pregnant, she is thoroughly unclear about the father's identity. In one of the most horrifying passages, we learn how Big Mama's daughter submitted to a brutal gang rape in exchange for a fix. Even this pales next to the moment when Big Mama, desperate to find a home for her family, gets down on her knees before an unseen social worker and tearfully begs for help.

If Hurt Village is an ambitious drama with a strong voice of its own, that doesn't mean that Hall is completely on top of things. The first 30-40 minutes of the script are written so densely in ghetto slang -- and, in Patricia McGregor's otherwise electrifying staging, delivered at such warp speed -- that it's hard for the uninitiated to take in more then every second or third word. (At the performance I attended several audience members failed to return after intermission: I suspect it's because they couldn't follow the action.) It's especially unfortunate that this happens as we're trying to sort out the characters and their relationships. (I must add that this improves enormously as time goes by, and the second act is perfectly intelligible.)

On the other hand, when Hall wants to make a point, she frequently wields a bludgeon. She produces a science project of Cookie's -- a study of fleas trapped in a jar; when the cover is removed, she hypothesizes, they will have lost their instinct for escape -- a notion that all but screams "metaphor." And if Hall has an undeniable talent for spinning poetry out of street talk, she also has a taste for purple dialogue; exhibit A is Crank's remark that "I can't seem to crack the safe I kept my heart in," or Cookie's announcement, having been sent home from school, "I ain't gonna pledge no allegiance to no flag that don't pledge no allegiance to me." That last wince-inducing line got a big hand at the performance I attended. (Hall redeems this moment by revealing that Cookie has fled in shame, having had her first period, unaware of what is happening.) Most disappointing of all, Hall wraps up the action too abruptly, giving Cookie a speech that spells out everyone's fates; this may be because, at a running time of two hours and 40 minutes, somebody may have felt enough was enough, but it is unsatisfying nonetheless.

Still, McGregor's staging ensures that every brutal confrontation and savagely skeptical remark is mined for full effect. The standouts in the generally excellent cast include Joaquina Kalukango as Cookie, her fresh mouth and brash manner belying her carefully guarded innocence; Marsha Stephanie Blake as Crank, especially when, exhausted by events, she gives back in to crack; Corey Hawkins as Buggy, afflicted with PTSD nightmares and the desperate belief that he can buy his family's way out of poverty with a few drug sales; and Ron Cephas Jones, smooth as silk and deadly as arsenic as Tony C. Playing her second tough-talking ghetto matron this season, Tonya Pinkins makes Big Mama into a vivid and indomitable figure, no more so than when she brusquely turns away from Buggy and the roll of ill-gotten cash he has brought her.

Hurt Village is staged in the Signature's black box space, but that doesn't prevent David Gallo from installing a bombed-out two-level hellhole of a set; it's a remarkable job of cramming the maximum amount of detail into a very small space, and it is totally justified by the script, which details the degrading effects of this environment on the play's characters. Clint Ramos' costumes, Sarah Sidman's lighting, and Robert Kaplowitz's sound design and original music are all first-class jobs. Special kudos to Cookie Jordan, the hair, wig, and makeup designer, who, I assume, was the person in charge of transforming Pinkins into the overweight, gray-haired beast of burden that is Big Mama.

"They say sometimes it takes a village to raise a child, but sometimes a child got to raise her own goddam self," says Cookie near the end of Hurt Village. Maybe, but by then, Katori Hall has proven her ability at creating a gallery of distinct characters, each of them in a desperate jam. I thought I had Hall down pat; I won't make that mistake again.--David Barbour