Katori Hall on the TV adaptation of her play Pussy Valley: ‘The stripping world is complicated’

The StarzPlay series ‘P-Valley’ corrects the woeful misrepresentation of sex workers on TV, discovers Annabel Nugent, who talks to its creator about trying to see the world through their eyes, and why ‘we can’t all be lean-in feminists’

(StarzPlay)

Sex work has long captured Hollywood’s imagination. It makes sense: neon-lit, scantily-clad and cash-fuelled – on its surface the sex industry reflects many of the fantasies film loves to reproduce. Cult classics that flirt with the industry like Pretty Baby (1978), Pretty Woman (1990), Showgirls (1995) and Striptease (1996) remain cultural touchstones, while fictional strip clubs like The Sopranos’ Bada Bing are are so ubiquitous that HBO still sells T-shirts emblazoned with its logo a decade later. Similar stories have been told on this side of the Atlantic too – the 1995 series Band of Gold captivated 15 million viewers weekly, and later Lucy Pebble’s 2011 Secret Diary of a Call Girl saw Hannah Baxter, played by Billie Piper, airing the “secrets” of sex work under the pseudonym, Belle de Jour.

More recent iterations have similarly embedded themselves in cinema: Natalie Portman’s baby pink bob from Closer (2004) makes an appearance at every Halloween party, and Marisa Tomei’s Oscar-nominated performance in The Wrestler (2008) is still one of the best to date.

Besides a select few though, cultural representations of sex workers have been historically woeful. But the seismic effect of the #MeToo reckoning has rippled out to every genre, subgenre and sub-subgenre, and now every inch of film possesses a blurry but notable divide between pre- and post-#MeToo eras. Including stories of stripping and strippers. It was last year that Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers solidified a change in the tide for movies about stripping, helped along by earlier shows like The Girlfriend Experience and HBO’s The Deuce.

It seems attention is finally being paid, untold stories are being heard and authenticity is beginning to matter. It’s not that strip clubs have changed, but those same qualities used as fantasy fulfilment in Nineties blockbusters are being mined to talk about themes that resonate today. There are few places where gender dynamics, economic inequality, sex and power can be as acutely observed as they are in a strip club – or as widely spoken about as in a popular, glitzy series about them.

P-Valley will be the latest to join this growing body of strip club dramas, when it is released on on 12 July on StarzPlay. Based on acclaimed writer Katori Hall’s play of a similar, slightly less PG name (Pussy Valley), the show is set in the milieu of strippers in America’s Deep South. In it, strippers do not exist solely as writhing bodies in the background, a forlorn love interest, or to fulfil the perfunctory “damsel in distress” tickbox to advance a male character’s development. Hall, who is also on board as the series showrunner, tells the rare story of the dancers themselves.

Rarer still is her ability to sidestep tired tropes of sex work in a show where sexuality and violence loom large. The show achieves complexity where even its more progressive harbingers have faltered. For the most part, Magic Mike, the Steven Soderbrgh film about a male strip troupe in Tampa, is an exhilarating romp that demystifies a controversial profession – but then it gives in to the old redemption storyline. Channing Tatum’s titular character quits his job as a stripper for a shot at redemption with a straight-laced love interest who disapproves of his lifestyle. The movie’s end just reinforces the stigma it had spent 90 minutes craftily undoing in the first place. Even Hustlers at times succumbs to the temptation to paint over stripping’s complexities in broad strokes of “girl power” and glitter. When attempting to destigmatise something which has a long history of being shamed, there is a compelling (and understandable) impulse to cover up the shades of grey so that there can be no shadow of a doubt left.

But Hall has never shied away from messy conclusions or uneasy truths. Instead the playwright, who won an Olivier for her play The Mountaintop, about Martin Luther King, has crafted a show on how flimsy the line between liberation and exploitation can be for strippers, and sex workers more broadly. Over Zoom, Hall’s excitement for P-Valley’s debut is palpable even across the pixelated barriers of our laptops – but it is also matched with an earnestness in the knowledge that P-Valley is contributing something important: “I’m really interested in the show engaging in a conversation about feminism that embraces its contradictions.” Hall explains: “The world of stripping is complicated. It’s a patriarchal space. Women are struggling and it’s oftentimes very dangerous, but yet there are so many women who [as strippers] have been able to climb out of poverty or leave abusive relationships. They’ve found financial and sexual freedom within that space.” Hall refers to Cardi-B who in interviews has spoken candidly about her past as a stripper, a profession which the rapper says was harmful to her self-esteem, but that ultimately saved her life.

In the high-energy moments of P-Valley, the dancers are on stage: athletes dazzling in mesh and rhinestones, pivoting around a pole so quickly that their hair whips fast behind them. Trap music plays overhead and faceless figures on the sidelines either cheer or wear the glazed-over look of someone in a trance. Cash flutters to their stilettoed feet as they revel in their own beauty and power. All shimmering flesh and unabashed sexuality. In other scenes, the same dancers are dodging the hands of groping clients and navigating the threat of male entitlement to their bodies.

Hall is unambiguous in both her opinions on sex work, and those who disapprove of it: “They’re not thinking about… the group of women who live at the intersection of race, class and gender.” Hall is talking about white feminism, a brand of feminism that does not account for the factors of race and class which make sexism a multi-layered discrimination. White feminism acknowledges that a woman makes 78 cents to a man’s dollar, but elides the fact that black women earn 64 cents and Hispanic women only 56 cents. It’s the same type of feminism that sells Dior T-shirts reading “We Should All Be Feminists” for £580. White feminism is unsurprisingly something Hollywood plays into – most of post-#MeToo entertainment still centres white stories only; The Assistant, Bombshell and The Morning Show are notable examples.

Katori Hall at Rolling Stone’s Women Shaping the Future event in March 2020 (Rex)

Hall points out: “We can’t all be ‘lean in’ feminists. Sometimes we have to think about hood feminism.” She is referring to Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean in: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, in which the Facebook COO implores women in the corporate space to take charge of their own careers and push past gender bias. Although it became a bestseller, the book was also criticised for its privileged tunnel view of feminism. Sandberg’s book illustrates the glaring blindspot mainstream feminism has when it comes to race and economic circumstances; things that “hood feminism”, a term coined by author Mikki Kendall, focuses on. And certainly there is no room for white feminism in P-Valley, where questions of misogyny are impossible to address without considering class and race too.

One of the greatest things about the series is its sense of place. From the first episode, the Mississippi setting is set up to be as important to the show’s story as the stripping is. It’s a running theme for Hall; most of her work focuses on the Black Southern experience, affording it the nuance it is not usually granted in cultural representations. Watching P-Valley, it takes time for the ear to tune in to the idiom of Southern slang, the same way my own acclimates when listening to Hall speak about frequenting strip clubs as part of her coming of age growing up in Memphis, Tennessee – a background signalled by a peppering of “y’all”s, elongated vowels and a cheery demeanour too friendly to come from where Hall now lives in New York City.

Southern culture is inseparable from Hall’s imagination, and the overlap between it and strip club culture in P-Valley is explosively vibrant, and soundtracked to the synthesised drums of the best Trap music in the American South. The show unveils a world overlooked by the film industry, but it doesn’t stop at simple exposition; P-Valley peels back the layers of power and privilege that operate even within that marginalised community. The show touches on themes of colourism when Mercedes, the club’s top earner, finds herself losing dances to newcomer Autumn, who patrons favour explicitly because of her light-skinned complexion.

The series is predictably not PG, but for a show where most of the action unfolds at a strip club and the majority of conversations are had with at least one nearly nude woman involved, P-Valley feels remarkably non-voyeuristic. For Hall, it has always been about the female gaze. “From the jump, I would talk with my directors about how we embed the camera inside these women. How do we experience this club through their perspective, see the customers through their eyes?”

It’s sexy but not sleazy; there is an abundance of nudity on screen but it never lingers and it never feels exploitative. The deliberate camerawork also works to reveal the fundamental truth that stripping is really, really hard work – and half the work is making it seem like it’s none at all. In the first episode Mercedes, played by Brandee Evans, takes the stage resplendent in glistening red leather. She climbs a pole until she is fully upside down and the heels of her thigh-high boots are planted on the ceiling. The crowd is ecstatic. The music is bass-heavy and loud. And then the club’s noise fades away until all that can be heard is the sound of Mercedes heavily breathing and the uncomfortable noise of leather-sticking-on-pole as she descends head first, stopping just a few inches short of the now cash-strewn stage. Although glamorous in parts, P-Valley mostly does away with fantasies, in favour of a more meaningful endeavour to expose the hidden labours of stripping.

Such a “female gaze” would likely have been impossible without the show’s all-women director line-up. “There’s this lie in Hollywood that there’s no women directors who are ready,” Hall scoffs. “I always say that women get hired based on credits and men get hired based on potential, so I was like I’m going to look for potential in women because I feel we aren’t afforded that opportunity enough.” The eight directors include award-winning music director Karena Evans (Drake’s “Nice for What”), Sydney Freeland (Grey’s Anatomy) and Barbara Brown (Scream Queens).

Just as the success of Hustlers was underpinned by its appeals to authenticity – consulting real strippers and employing intimacy coordinators on set – P-Valley too has academic levels of research backing it. Hall spent six years visiting strip clubs across the country, interviewing more than 40 women about their experiences. The result is an attention to the granular details of the stripping world and its unique economic system – for example, that dancers are not only required to pay house fees and additional fees for each private dance, but are expected to further cannibalise their earnings by paying out a portion to the DJ, manager, bartender and security guard.

Authenticity matters. And not just to Hall. Evans, who plays Mercedes, went to clubs throughout America to research her role. “I would go in and pay for a lap dance and try to get stories out of them. I’d be like ‘So yeah girls, what do you want to do after [stripping]?’ and they’d be like ‘Girl… just tip me’,” laughs Evans. “But then I’d tell them about the role and they’d open up. It was really fun getting to know the ladies.”

Rather than succumb to box office-approved narratives, or reduce strip club culture to the singular catch-all of “girl power”, P-Valley does not tie anything up neatly in a bow. Instead, it takes viewers to the loose ends of feminism and leaves them there. And it’s this willingness to loiter in messy politics that distinguishes P-Valley from others like it. Hall’s characters are never prescriptive; they have voice, agency, and the sort of multi-layered complexity that strippers have historically been denied in their cultural representations.

We are in post-#MeToo terrain – lines are being redrawn and unheard voices are getting airtime, but still it is only some stories from a certain kind of person we are hearing, and so Hall’s contribution with P-Valley is a valuable one. And being one which, as Hall puts it, has “all those black lady hands on the wheel” means that inclusion does not stop at the fringes of a fictional story, but reaches out to those who help to tell it in behind the camera.

‘P-Valley’ is released on 12 July on StarzPlay (available as a stand-alone app or via Amazon Prime Video or Virgin TV)