'It's a workplace drama': P-Valley creator Katori Hall talks breakout stripper series
Research for a new play took writer Katori Hall to, of all places, a Crunch gym. The chain had poledancing classes, and her 2015 play Pussy Valley centered around a strip club in Mississippi’s “Dirty Delta”. But while pole-dancing became a fitness trend valued by the mainstream, the strippers, usually women using it for work, especially the black performers Hall grew up watching in and around Memphis, Tennessee, were not.
Instead, Hall’s play and the TV series it inspired, this summer’s P-Valley, on Starz, takes the strip club seriously, as a business and as a craft. Hall always knew pole-dancing was more Cirque du Soleil than stripping, but the effort required at her class was viscerally next-level; between the rotation of the pole and the exertion, she nearly vomited.
Pole-dancing “requires so much strength, so much flexibility, so much craft”, Hall, 39, told the Guardian from her home in New York. In writing Pussy Valley, she realized, “I have to honor this. I have to honor what these women are doing because this truly is a sport.”
P-Valley elevates and illustrates this athleticism, and the professional drama undergirding it, in lush, grounded detail. The ambitious, eight-hour drama drops you in a neon-hued pool rippling with prosodic slanguage, and unspools a web of relationships and rivalries in the fragile dance economy in the town of Chucalissa, Mississippi with rollicking, lissome dance sequences that regularly outdo Jennifer Lopez’s highlight-reel turn in last year’s Hustlers. With a lived-in, hopping joint – the Pynk Club – and an almost entirely black cast, P-Valley is fresh and intoxicating, garnering praise from the Guardian, the Hollywood Reporter and Rolling Stone, among others, as one of the best new shows of the year.
With both iterations of P-Valley, Hall sought to “use the strip club as a prism through which you investigate those intersections of race, class and gender”, she said, the culmination of year’s of research, and a shift in genre to weave in threads running throughout her previous plays. Hall has set numerous works in the south where she grew up: the 2007 Off-Broadway show Hoodoo Love, about an aspiring singer in Depression-era Memphis, or Hurt Village, about a housing project in the city. She won an Olivier award for her 2009 play The Mountaintop, about the Rev Martin Luther King Jr’s last night before he was assassinated at Memphis’s Lorraine Motel, and co-wrote the book for the Tina Turner musical.
But the TV version of Pussy Valley tells “stories that I’ve been wanting to write my entire life”, said Hall. “The story of growing up in the South, the story of gentrification, the story of pushing up against corporate powers,” and themes of colorism, a known quantity in the world of exotic dancing that comes up repeatedly with the club’s clientele; when the Pynk’s long-reigning “OG” star Mercedes (Brandee Evans) is snubbed for a private dance in favor of a light-skinned, mysterious newbie named Autumn (Elarica Johnson), she remarks that some men “can’t handle themselves a Melanin Monroe”.
As with Hustlers, last summer’s hit about New York City strippers-turned-con-artists under the pressure of the recession, P-Valley treats strippers – their work, expertise and sisterhood – with care and frankness. “This is a workplace drama,” said Hall. “It’s about the family that you choose versus your blood family.”
For research, Hall took the fitness classes, attended pole-dancing championships, followed the Instagrams of professional dancers such as Alethea Austin, who served as a body double for Gidget, the Pynk’s one white dancer, on the show. Most importantly, she visited strip clubs across the south, looking like a customer, but “instead of throwing dollars at them, I was throwing questions”. She conducted over 40 interviews with dancers and those involved at the club, “talking to them like they were real human beings and not just these objects of desire”. She asked about their profession, observed the sisterhood backstage (dressing room banter peppers each episode, the best kind of locker-room talk). “Often what was revealed to me was that the profession chose them,” she said, either through skill or, more often, a lack of other viable options. One woman needed a root canal but didn’t have dental insurance; she made the money dancing, then kept at it for five years. Others used their earnings to escape abusive relationships.
The import of these interviews punches through in one of the first episode’s standout moments – it doesn’t surprise me that it’s mentioned in every review of the show I’ve read (including mine), since it’s seared into my brain – in which Mercedes ascends to the height of the pole. As she reaches the ceiling, the music (as a whole, largely and deliberately soundtracked to female emcees and rappers) cuts out, leaving only the cues of hard work: Mercedes’s heavy breathing, the squeak of skin against metal, the strain of the pole. If you ever had any doubt about the finesse and tenacity required for pole-dancing, the scene will obliterate it in seconds.
The sound-cut moment was a natural collaboration between Hall, pilot director Karena Evans, a team of sound designers, and the show’s commitment to the female gaze – the attempt to ground perspective in the dancer as subject, rather than object, of the viewer’s identification. “I’ve always wanted to make sure that people felt like they were walking in the highheeled platforms of the women inhabiting this world,” said Hall.
With P-Valley, a show whose main set piece is a strip club drawing fans from around the south, “the biggest landmine is you’re stepping into a world that has been so stigmatized and misrepresented,” said Hall. “There’s these shows that have used the strip club as a backdrop but they’ve never really investigated the women who are working there.” There’s a long, tired history of hyper-sexualized images of black women, “so as a black woman myself, I knew that in order for this show to feel empathetic and grounded we needed to challenge the history but also still be extremely authentic to the world.”
Hall and her team of all-female directors laid considerate, revisionist boardwalks around long-established pitfalls: not the piecemeal, shruggedoff bits of female nudity found in shows like the Sopranos. Not a gaze of lust, but inquiry and appreciation. Were the women assured? Confident? Anxious? Exhausted? The goal, said Hall, was to have audiences “appreciate how a woman’s body looked but make sure that people appreciated what a women’s body could do”. As such, the art of the dance is frequently spliced with flashbacks (for Autumn, to a violent past from which she has fled), splintered with shadows and closeups on the clients, stripped of sound to unmask the effort. “If we didn’t need a woman to be nude to articulate a point or for it to dovetail into plot development or character development, we didn’t do it,” said Hall.
One of the series’ breakout characters is Uncle Clifford (Nicco Annan, who has inhabited the character both on stage and on screen), the Pynk’s owner and heart, a gender-fluid (with she/ her pronouns) entrepreneur threading a fine line between protective mother hen and business maven. Between her command of the club and relationship with a hyper-masculine aspiring rapper, Uncle Clifford is one of the most fabulous and revolutionary characters on TV. Uncle Clifford “feels like a human being because she was based off of three amazing human beings in my life”, said Hall, as the character is a fusion of three family members: her mother, who “don’t take nobody’s mess”; her father, a gun-toting man from Coldwater, Mississippi; and her real-life Uncle Clifford, a “saucy”, tough-talking “truth-teller”.
“None of them are LGBTQIA,” she said, but the Pynk needed “a figure to have equal access to femininity and masculinity, particularly in that space where, if you are managing a place like that, you have to be a therapist. You have to be a good business person. And you have to rely on toughness in order to push these girls out on stage and to keep the men in check.”
As the show adapted from play to TV over years, Hall of course did not imagine launching in the middle of a pandemic, as America reels from protests for Black Lives Matter in the street and a racial reckoning for business and entertainment. The experience is “bittersweet”, she said, but “I’m grateful that it seems like right now the world is ready to listen, because we’ve arrived to this reckoning in our society worldwide.” The movement for Black Lives Matter “extends to this protest that I have always chanted in my career and my life, which is that Black Stories Matter”.
She’s a firm believer in the importance of stories, in the humanizing power of art. Stories “don’t change policy, but I do think they change policy makers. Not everybody can protest, not everybody can donate, and not everybody can tell a story, but for those of us who can tell those stories and create these moments of time where humanity can be seen and felt, it’s so important to the movement,” she said. “It’s always been important to all movements.”
P-Valley airs on Starz in the US and on StarzPlay on Amazon in the UK