Mitt Romney, the presumptive GOP nominee for President of the United States recently told a CNN interviewer: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.”  Playwright Katori Hall presents a resounding rebuttal of the presumed efficacy of this great American “safety net” in her production Hurt Village, directed by Patricia McGregor at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Even for those audience members who, like Governor Romney, do not concern themselves with the very poor, it is impossible to avoid being sucked in to the rotting tenements, garbage strewn streets, and fiery rap battles of Hurt Village.

Reminiscent of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play A Raisin in the Sun, Ms. Hall’s Hurt Village follows a very poor and often dysfunctional African American family lead by the steely (and weary) matriarch Big Mama (Tonya Pinkins) as they prepare to move away from the crumbling Memphis Hurt Village projects. The palpable sense of entrapment sets in when Big Mama learns she has made $387 too much to qualify for the low income housing in a nearby Tennessee suburb.  With the impending demolition of their housing complex by the government, Big Mama is desperate to qualify for the low-income housing lest she and her family end up homeless.

Ms. Hall’s story-line is brought to life by a superb cast bursting with energy. The latent savagery with which Ron Cephas Jones plays the slick local drug lord Tony C is disturbing. Meanwhile Joaquina Kalukango’s spirited portrayal of Cookie, the precocious (yet still shockingly naïve) pre-teen great-granddaughter of Big Mama, counter-balances the bleakness of Hurt Village with much needed hope and humor.

Foiled by the arbitrary cut-offs of the welfare office Big Mama says “Them folks don’t care nothing about us.” Big Mama’s grandson Buggy (Corey Hawkins), the traumatized veteran recently returned from the front lines of Iraq, replies to Big Mama “Where ‘they’ hidin’ at? I ain’t never seen no ‘they.’ ‘They’ is you and you and you.” Throughout Hurt Village the audience never sees a “they” either—even when Big Mama speaks to a welfare worker the audience sees Big Mama plead compassion from an empty chair.

In such instances Ms. Hall hits you over the head with blatant symbolism (as in a scene in which Cookie explains a science experiment involving fleas attempting to escape from a jar). The script’s brashness and lack of symbolic subtlety works in Ms. Hall’s favor, however; painting the characters’ plight as a black-and-white failure of the welfare system to help those most in need. Hurt Village refutes the statements of many politicians who claim welfare makes the poor lazy, and compels compassion through the veracity and vitality of its characters.