Twenty years ago, Katori Hall was an aspiring playwright who had just finished her undergraduate degree. Within ten years, she would have an Olivier Award and her break-out play running on Broadway. Fastforward to now and Hall has a Pulitzer Prize and an acclaimed cable TV show. It’s an enviable streak of success, and one the writer has accomplished without compromising her commitment to giving voice to the underrepresented. 

Memphis, Tennessee, Hall’s hometown, features prominently in most of her dramatic works, and she credits her interest in theatre to the stories her parents would share around the dinner table. The future writer grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood of the city, making Hall often the only Black student in her classes. She became her high school’s first Black valedictorian and after graduation moved to New York to study theatre at Columbia University.  

An assignment in one of her college classes would set her on the path of playwriting, a story she recounted to Columbia Magazine in 2011. “I was in my second acting class […],” she says, “and my teacher told us to go to the library and find a play that had a scene for your type. My acting partner happened to be another Black woman, and we really struggled to find a play embraced by the canon that had a scene for two young Black women. So we went back to our instructor and said, ‘Please give us some suggestions,’ and she couldn’t think of anything. In that moment I thought, I’m going to have to write some plays with scenes for two young Black women.” 

Continuing to feel out of place in Columbia’s theatre department, Hall switched majors to African-American Studies but also continued to pursue creative writing. A scene she wrote for an undergraduate playwriting class would eventually evolve into her debut full-length play, Hoodoo Love. After graduating Columbia in 2003, Hall enrolled in the MFA Acting program at Harvard University/American Repertory Theatre. “It was at the ART that I was introduced to the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks and Lynn Nottage,” she told Columbia Magazine. “I knew they were out there, but now I was learning the lines and seeing inside the worlds that they’d created. I ate it up. Because I saw these two young black women — who had locks like mine — writing plays, I thought maybe I could really do this.” 

Returning to New York with her master’s degree, Hall sought acting jobs and continued to write plays. She submitted a now finished Hoodoo Love to the Cherry Lane Theatre Mentor Project in 2006. One of the mentors that year was her idol Lynn Nottage, who chose the 25-year-old Hall’s play for the program. After a year of development, the play debuted off-Broadway in 2007. Hall was subsequently accepted into the playwriting program at Julliard and received a Playwrights of New York fellowship from the Lark Play Development Center. She then began work on what would be her breakthrough play, one she had been thinking about writing ever since those dinner table storytelling sessions back in Memphis.  

“I don’t remember when my mother first told me this story,” Hall shared with Columbia Magazine in 2011, “but she told it to me over and over again, every year on [Dr. Martin Luther] King’s birthday or the day that he died. She’d say, ‘You know, when I was fifteen I tried to go hear him speak, but I couldn’t because Big Mama said that I couldn’t — she heard that they was gonna bomb the church. So I decided to stay my ass at home. And I am so sorry I did, because I just never heard the man speak.’” The opportunity Hall’s mother refers to was Dr. King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, the night before he was assassinated on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. Inspired by these stories of her mother’s, the playwright chose to explore a fictionalized account of King, back at the hotel after having given his speech, that would “deconstruct and humanize” the civil rights icon. Speaking to the Washington Post in 2013, Hall elaborated, “When my mom told me that story, I thought, ‘If my mother was afraid to go to the church, then Dr. King must have been really afraid to go to the church.’ […] He had vulnerabilities and fears. This is a man that provided a fundamental shift in American society. King forced us to see people of color are not second-class citizens; they are equal. He did this extraordinary thing. But he wasn’t superhuman. He always said, ‘I’m a sinner. Not a saint.’ That is the King you will see in Mountaintop. It was important to see the humanity in this hero so we can see the hero in ourselves.” 

Unable to find anyone willing to produce The Mountaintop in New York, Hall sent a copy to a British director friend, James Dacre, who staged a production in a 63-seat theatre above a pub in London in 2009. The run quickly sold out and commercial producer Sonia Friedman financed a West End transfer to Trafalgar Studios. Hall went on to win the Best New Play award at the 2010 OIivier Awards, the first Black woman to do so. A Broadway production of the play, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett, opened in September 2011. 

On the eve of her Broadway debut, the 30-year-old Hall was named one of the resident playwrights at Signature Theatre Company in New York, which pledged to produce three world premieres by the writer over the next five years. Her plays Hurt Village and Our Lady of Kibeho premiered at the venerable off-Broadway company in 2012 and 2014, respectively. Hall was also hired to write the book for a biographical musical about singer Tina Turner, which became the writer’s biggest commercial success. West End and Broadway productions of Tina were both running when the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, and both productions restarted again in 2021 when restrictions eased, with the London production still running today. 

Meanwhile, Hall began developing a TV series for Starz based on another play of hers. P-Valley is set in the Mississippi Delta region and explores the lives of the Black female dancers employed at a strip club called The Pynk. Debuting in 2020 to critical acclaim, P-Valley returned for a second season in 2022 and is currently in production on a third season. Hall’s work writing, directing and producing the series have been recognized with several awards. 

Despite the newfound success in musicals and television, Hall continues to dedicate herself to writing plays. The Hot Wing King, the final world premiere of her Signature Theatre Company residency, began performances in early 2020, running for only a few weeks before the pandemic shutdown. The play, nevertheless, made a huge impression, winning the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and securing additional productions around the country in the years since. Inspired by Hall’s brother and his partner, The Hot Wing King, just like P-Valley, dramatizes and humanizes “even the marginalized folks within a marginalized community,” as Hall explained to Harvard Magazine in 2020. In a later interview with the Alliance Theatre for the play’s staging there in 2023, Hall said, “What’s so interesting about this play—which is quietly revolutionary—is that it is taking apart this idea of not only the American family but also the Black family and challenging it, deconstructing it and putting forth [the reality] that this is actually a valid American family and a valid Black American family. We don’t ever really get to see that, whether it be on our stage or on our screens.” 

Hall remains passionate about live performance, despite her newfound success on television, and the National Theatre’s upcoming production of The Hot Wing King will bring her work back to London where she had her career breakthrough. It’s a dedication that you could describe as fervent. “I do think theater is church. It is a space we gather in—the people on stage are our pastors for that moment and they’re up on a pulpit and they are preaching a kind of story,” she told Harvard Magazine. “I am spiritual. But while I don’t go to church every Sunday, I do go to theater every Saturday.”