Memphis’ Katori Hall debuts new TV series on Starz
At a climactic moment in the first episode of the Starz drama series “P-valley,” created by Memphis writer Katori Hall, an exotic dancer named Mercedes ascends a pole in the middle of a stage inside a Mississippi strip club identified by a deejay as “the finest shake joint... in the Dirty Delta.”
As Mercedes hoists herself up the pole and strikes gravity-defying poses, the pounding hip-hop music and the enthusiastic crowd noises recede, until the soundtrack is occupied entirely by the evidence of the woman’s exertions – her heavy breathing, her grunts of effort, the painful fingers-rubbing-a-balloon squelch of flesh on metal.
For spectators in front of their televisions at home if not for the extras cast as spectators in front of the stage in the show, the scene deglamorizes and desexualizes the “stripper pole” routine, and makes the performance a subjective rather than voyeuristic experience. It transforms Mercedes from an object of fantasy into a woman at work, performing not for the pleasure of men but for the sake of her bank account – and, maybe, for her own personal satisfaction.
“As you know, there have been so many clubs in Memphis, from Pure Passion to Platinum Plus to The Pony, and when I would go into these spaces, I would see these women up on the pole, and I was enthralled with what they could do,” said Hall, 39, in an interview from New York, where she now lives. “I was so impressed with the strength and the athleticism that these women exhibited. They would be upside-down, they would slide around, they would hover like birds – I would see this empowering image in the midst of all this exploitation. “I even tried to take poledancing classes myself, and I was bad at it,” she said. “I can twerk a little, but this pole-dancing thing, like walking on air and hanging from one arm off a metal pole – that’s a whole new level of respect.”
Some four years in development, “Pvalley” debuts Sunday at 8 p.m. (Memphis time) on the Starz cable network; on July 19, it moves to its regular 7 p.m. for the remaining seven episodes of its first season. The series expands on a 2015 play by Hall that spelled out the word represented by the “P” in the TV series title. (Although the show contains plenty of profanity and some nudity, the title was shortened for television because cable providers balked at listing the full name on their program guides, according to Hall.)
A graduate of Craigmont High School and a former intern at The Commercial Appeal whose family (including parents Carrie and Lasalle Hall Jr.) remains in Memphis, Hall is perhaps best known for her 2006 two-character play “The Mountaintop,” set in Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel on the final night of Dr. Martin Luther King’s life.
That play debuted in London, and earned Hall the distinction of being the first woman to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. When the play opened on Broadway in 2011, the two characters were portrayed by Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett.
Much of Hall’s subsequent work also has been influenced by her Memphisregion heritage. Her 2012 play “Hurt Village” takes place in the Memphis housing project of that name, while her most high-profile project to date – pre-”p-valley,” at least – is “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” a so-called “jukebox” musical that incorporates Ike & Tina and Tina Turner hits into a dramatization of the life story of Annie Mae Bullock, the poor girl from Nutbush, Tennessee (60 miles northeast of Memphis), who became a world-famous pop diva. Hall wrote the “book” (the non-musical portion of the script) for “Tina,” which debuted in 2018 in London before opening on Broadway in November. In other words, the past several months have been intensely active for Hall, whose “P-valley” arrives at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has made the tucking of dollar bills into G-strings and other strip-club activities even less likely to pass Health Department muster than in the best of times.
“There’s no social distancing in a lap dance, absolutely not!” joked Hall.
If strip clubs bring out the scold in police officers and health inspectors, they bring out the poet in network publicists. “Deep down in the Mississippi Delta lies an oasis of grit and glitter in a rough patch of human existence where beauty can be hard to find,” states a Starz press release about “P-valley.”
“This southern-fried, hour-long drama tells the kaleidoscopic story of a little-strip-club-that-could and the big characters who come through its doors – the hopeful, the lost, the broken, the ballers, the beautiful, and the damned,” the press release continues. “Trap music meets film noir in this lyrical and atmospheric series that dares to ask what happens when small-town folk dream beyond the boundaries of the Piggly Wiggly and the pawnshop.”
Shot in 2019 in the Atlanta area, “Pvalley” takes place in the fictional small town of Chucalissa, Mississippi, which Hall imagines as being “Tunica-adjacent.”
“I always say, it’s what you’d get if Memphis and Jackson, Mississippi, had a baby,” she said. “A perfect mix of city and country folks, rural and more developed areas, industrial and near the big beautiful river.”
And, yes, the town is named for Chucalissa, the Native American archaeological site near T.O. Fuller State Park in Memphis.
“I wanted to honor indigenous history in America,” Hall explained. “I feel as though we have forgotten there was a group of people here before the takeover of the American land happened... It’s very much a part of the Southern cultural landscape to find these towns and rivers with names from Native American languages.”
The focus in “P-valley” is on the working women at the Pynk, a club with mostly Black employees and patrons (an exception is a blond dancer known as Gidget). The colorful character names include Miss Mississippi (played by Shannon Thornton), Autumn Night (Elarica Johnson), resident rapper Lil’ Murda (J. Alphonse Nicholson), and club impresario Uncle Clifford (Nicco Annan), who sardonically characterizes Pynk as a “warehouse of sin.”
Clifford also adds some Memphis flavor when he reports that he “had to Al Green” an adversary: “I poured a pot of hot grits all over his ding-a-ling.”
Hall’s control over “P-valley” is greater than Clifford’s over the Pynk. In addition to being the series creator, she is the showrunner and executive producer; she is a writer and a sometime director; and she is the co-writer of the series theme song, “Down in the Valley,” cowritten and performed by Memphis rapper Jucee Froot (“Down in the valley where the girls get naked/ If you throw bands [money] than you know she gonna shake it...”) Memphis also is represented in a big way in front of the camera: The lead or at least co-lead character of Mercedes is played by former Memphian Brandee Evans (at one point, Mercedes brags about her “Mississippibred chitlins-and-cornbread-fed booty”); supporting characters are portrayed by Memphis actors Zachariah Rogers and Bertram Williams Jr.
The most significant feature of the “P-valley” cast and crew, however, may be that the directors of all eight firstseason episodes are women, including such notables as Kimberly Peirce (”Boys Don’t Cry”), Tamra Davis (”Billy Madison”) and Hall herself.
The idea is that women filmmakers – who have their own histories of struggle in the male-dominated entertainment industry – are better able to understand the dancer characters in the series. Instead of leering, they’ll empathize.
“These women had their own lived experiences and they had already been grappling with the male gaze and pushing up against it in their work, and they had centered the female gaze in their own work,” Hall said.
She said the female directors knew how to present the necessary nudity of the scripts in ways that would “subvert” the potential for exploitation.
“The nudity is always in service to the story,” Hall said, contrasting “P-valley” to the lurid “sex position” pyrotechnics of such cable fare as “Game of Thrones.”
She said the show sometimes makes use of point-of-view shots to “make sure the audience feels they are walking in the high-heeled platforms of these women.
We use a lot of closeups that make the audience feel they are inside the women’s minds. We wanted to challenge all the hypersexualized images of women and Black women in particular that are so prevalent.” Hall said she was attracted to these type women as characters because they too often have been marginalized or dismissed or disrespected, when in fact their struggles with family, religion, addiction, racism, sexism, classism and so on make their stories universal in theme, if especially dramatic, given the strip-club context.
“I feel like the voices of these specific women, these strippers, have always mattered, but we are just now arriving at a time when the world is willing to listen,” Hall said. “Black Lives Matter – I also include ‘Black Stories Matter.’ I feel as though stories can help create empathy and understanding for a group of people who have been dehumanized for so long, and Black people have truly been dehumanized for too long.”