The Hot Wing King at the Alliance Theater Reminds Me of a Great Southern Movie
“Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion,” is one of the best lines from “Steel Magnolias.” Like “The Hot Wing King,” it too started out as a beloved play with quick wit, memorable lines and wholly focused on a group of Southern friends and their quirks.
“The Hot Wing King,” a Pulitzer-Prize winning play by Katori Hall, is about to wrap at The Alliance Theatre. The performance had me laughing through tears so many times, I couldn’t help but recite Dolly Parton’s famous line in my head. Only instead of white ladies, “The Hot Wing King” is an all black cast. Oh, and it’s all male. And instead of them talking about their hetero marital problems, four of the six cast members are gay.
Ok, so it’s really nothing like “Steel Magnolias” on first glance. But stay with me. Hall writes hilarity into a plethora of scenes, captures Southern characters beautifully and takes the audience on a roller coaster of emotions that the comparisons to the 1989 movie kept coming to me. And I know “The Hot Wing King” would make an incredible movie. I cried, laughed, felt wildly uncomfortable, angry, cried some more, laughed some more and actually yelled “No!” out loud in pure anxiety at the character Isom who was about to unknowingly ruin all Cordell’s dreams. (You’ll have to go see it to see what I mean.)
I was so engaged and enthralled, that I was fully in my feelings. And isn’t that what great art does for the audience? I forgot my life for a couple of hours and entered into the world of a black gay man in Memphis who left his wife and children to follow his true heart. He took me along while he chatted up his funny, loyal friends all there to help him win Memphis’ chicken wing contest.
In that span of time, they confront issues of infidelity, hiding your true identity, crime, poverty, hope, joy, finding love, relying on family, losing family, creating family out of friends, turning bad luck into good and redefining stereotypes. It was one of the best original pieces I’ve seen performed in a long time. Hats off to Hall. Kudos to the remarkable cast. And whoever built that set deserves some kind of award.
“The Hot Wing King” closes this weekend. On March 5, 2023, the curtain will fall in Atlanta. And I’m sad, because the beautiful set needs to be memorialized. Or at least passed on. It’s so good! But I hope that “The Hot Wing King” and its spicy characters pop up again in another city somewhere else soon. And then, fingers crossed, on the big screen.
