Katori Hall Plays One: Hoodoo Love; Hurt Village; The Mountaintop; Saturday Night/Sunday Morning by Katori Hall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Katori Hall’s plays are marked by such fierce honesty and incandescent writing that they stand head and shoulders above most other plays that I have read, and her voice is among the truest of any I have encountered. The Mountaintop is a study of the last evening of Martin Luther King’s life, a metaphysical journey into his final hours, a flight of fantasy that captures the reality of the moment moreso than could any literal rendering of events. The closing pages of the play take such risks and reap intense rewards. Hoodoo Love, her first play, is an enviable debut that points toward the appearance of a special writer, nothing ordinary about her. But Hurt Village is the most spectacular of the pieces, a study of a poor community in Memphis in which every day is a battle to the death among the residents, who are desperate in all their circumstances. The characters are hard to bear and the play terrified my students when I assigned it for their reading. Hall is better known now as the author of Pussy Valley, but these early plays are a clear indicator that there is no part of human life she cannot face head on.