A government Hope Grant means relocation for many of the project’s residents, including Cookie, a thirteen-year-old aspiring rapper, along with her mother, Crank, and great-grandmother, Big Mama. Hurt Village was built as a public housing project in the early 1950s. The Blind Side true story reveals that Michael's birth mother had been addicted to crack cocaine. "I took care of myself most of the time." Everything is new to her. In reality, Hurt Village was one of eight housing projects in Memphis. Racial tensions were at a high in the 1960s due to the sanitation strike and assassination of Martin Luther King. We ask for your ZIP code to determine certain eligibilities and for demographic purposes, but we will not use any personal, identifiable information. Much ado has been made about the language of the play. So while he was able to make space for this play, there was no wiggle room in his schedule. Henry Turley Company and partner Belz Enterprises had been developing Harbor Town on the opposite side of the Wolf River for almost a decade and believed that a similar concept could be carried over into the older neighborhood. Uptown, in coordination with the Tennessee Valley Authority and Memphis Light Gas and Water, also introduced a concept we call “EcoBuild”. Cookie’s home, the Memphis housing project “Hurt Village,” is more of a state of mind than an actual place. There’s the matriarch Big Mama, Cookie’s great-grandmother, a toxic mix of goodness and fatalism; there's Cookie's mother, Crank, a recovered crack-addict, desperate to go to cosmetology school so that she can set up her own salon; and then there's Cookie's father, Buggy, a returning Iraq war veteran, who's kind and gentle and elusive. Hurt Village is currently in development as a film. But as time went on, my experience changed.
Even so, assistant director Tonya Holloway acknowledges that for some in their audiences a hard language play will be a new experience. More than once new residents called the police on me in front of my own house and the police didn’t believe I lived there. The Hurt Village housing project was razed and an upscale community, Uptown, was built in its place. “Being that the play centers around a family going through gentrification, it is literally happening in the South Dallas community,” Bennett-Price says. It is gritty, but if one is going to tell a story, the language of that story must be authentic to the characters and situation. That perception of blacks is what prompted Fair Park and the City of Dallas to gain possession of homes and land from black people under eminent domain during the 1960s. In an effort to attract more white residents, the Memphis Housing Authority built an all-white housing development called Hurt Village in the 1950s. If you are looking for a an event, use the calendar section of this website. And for large parts of the play, the character drifts on the periphery, an afterthought to the real drama. And the question becomes not only what will become of her, but also how do you write about her? In the 1990s, north Memphis was one of the poorest, most under-served areas in the City. 31 at the Grace Temple Church in Oakland. I am speaking to the dysfunctional village that is still there. When asked about how his experience as an actor helps shape his directing. There is still that space in our community that is a village. For those who rent, in particular residents of housing projects, the effects are often devastating. Your date of birth is required to ensure all users are at least 13 years of age in accordance with our policies and state and federal laws. Cookie’s home, the Memphis housing project “Hurt Village,” is more of a state of mind than an actual place. And then you watch what happens in this play and that embrace is fractured.
Cookie's tales exceed her understanding. Originally it was built to attract more white people into that area of Memphis, which was trending black. Use any or all of the options below to search through all of reviews, interviews, features and special sections. Uptown has been certified as one of the largest green-building communities in the nation. Most whites who lived in Hurt Village … Hall hesitates to answer. But the question is to where. “I was a part of a neighborhood in Los Angeles that was gentrified. That it is scheduled to be demolished and all the residents relocated -- as actually happened to the real Hurt Village over the course of three years starting in 2000 -- only adds to its mythic allure. A well-established Community Garden is supported by the local chapter of Rotary and flourishes in the center of the neighborhood. Soul Rep tries to grab plays which help audiences see us through a different lens.”. The infamous Hurt Village housing project (featured in the motion picture The Blindside) was demolished and the empty site was transformed into a new mixed-income community with 114 apartments, 53 single-family homes and a commercial development component. University of North Texas College of Music. '. So it's appropriate that the play opens with Cookie taking on the role of village troubadour, the all-seeing artist -- “I spin ghetto tales that’ll make you weep,” she declares in a bracing entrance that matches the bravado of the slickest rappers. We're watching a show about Memphis and the destruction of a community where many, many people suffered. Currently moving into its sustainability phase, the development focus in Uptown will shift from bricks and mortar to the creation of a complete neighborhood. You sit in the beautiful loft of the elegant, rundown Grace Temple Church and you look up to the sky and feel the world’s embrace. Bennett-Price had planned to direct the piece, after being sidelined by an injury, she immediately thought of McNeil, who she had known since they were students at Howard University. And this is what makes Hurt Village so strange and affecting: Cookie, the star of the show, is almost unrepresentable. Residents were given vouchers for other temporary Section 8 housing while Uptown was being built. The drama possesses touches of the melodrama of Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun, the brutal social realism of Richard Wright, James Baldwin’s belief in the exceptional, and the crazed revenge fantasies of early 1970’s Blaxploitation films.
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