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

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 characterization.

Hoodoo Love is Hall's debut play, a tale of love, magic, jealousy and secrets and written in vivid language which captures the Blues. Toulou escapes from the Mississippi cotton fields in the 1930s to pursue her dream of singing the blues in Memphis. When she meets a rambling blues singer, the notorious Ace of Spades, her dreams are realized in a way she could never have imagined.

Hurt Village is set in a real-life Memphis housing project, which has become a painful symbol of urban decay. The piece focuses on a young African-American man who returns from fighting in Iraq to find that his home is being demolished. It explores in vivid and sometimes brutal detail a long-lasting legacy of drug abuse, child abuse, crime, and self-hatred within a poor, working-class, multi-generational Black family.

Winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Play 2009, The Mountaintop is a historical-fantastical two-person play, set at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where on the following evening, Martin Luther King will stand on the balcony to greet a crowd and be shot dead. Portraying rhetoric, hope and ideals of social change, The Mountaintop also explores the constraints of being flawed and human in the face of inevitable death.

Saturday Night/Sunday Morning is set in a Memphis beauty shop/boarding house during the final days of WWII, a group of African American women struggle with the heartbreak of losing their men to the war and with the uncertainty of what the future may hold when - and if - their soldiers return. Rich with humor and history, it is a story about friendship and finding love in unexpected places.