"Hurt Village," by Katori Hall The spirit of Lena Younger walks the rotting tenement corridors of Katori Hall's "Hurt Village," and she surely can't be cheered by what she sees. Not that Mama Younger, the matriarch from Lorraine Hansberry's "Raisin in the Sun," is ever mentioned by name in this sprawling, energy-packed play about the last days of a Memphis housing project in the early 21st century. Still, it's hard not to think of this production, which opened on Monday night at the new Pershing Square Signature Center, as a rousing, latter-day response to Hansberry's watershed drama of 1959, "A Raisin in the Sun." Like that play, Ms. Hall's latest offering is centered on an African-American family, ruled by an elderly woman of will, preparing to leave a shabby, claustrophobic apartment for a newer, brighter home. And like the Younger family of "Raisin," Ms. Hall's clan is going to encounter plenty of obstacles before it can make that move. But while Hansberry's play ended on a note of tempered optimism, Ms. Hall (the young author of "The Mountaintop," seen on Broadway earlier this season) suggests that, for many African-Americans, that promise of social betterment has never been fulfilled. The quiet rage that seethed through much of "Raisin" has been succeeded by an angry, whooping cry that is equal parts defiance and defeat. It's hardly surprising when one of the characters in "Hurt Village" cautions: "It ain't good to want too much. End up disappointed. Where there's vitality, there's hope, though. And while "Hurt Village" has its problems, being depressing isn't one of them. The production begins with its 13-year-old heroine, Cookie (Joaquina Kalukango), rapping an exultant love-hate poem to Hurt Village, the apartment complex where she has grown up, on the eve of its demolition. When she chants, "This be the war," what she's describing is a daily life in which you're always either armed for combat or as good as dead. Much of what follows in this play, directed by Patricia McGregor and vividly acted by a cast that includes the formidable Tonya Pinkins, is infused with the locomotive rhythms of that opening declaration of war. "Hurt Village" elicits the adrenaline-stoked ambivalence in the competitive rapping and insult swapping that are among its characters" favorite forms of recreation. Rap, of course, is by now a venerable art form. And the sort of escalating put-downs that are exchanged here have been a staple of sitcoms long before "The Jeffersons" (a show referred to with a roll of the eyes) flew up the Nielsen charts. But "Hurt Village" is as lucid as any work I know in identifying rap (and dissing) as both a weapon and a release, a brandishing of arms and of affection. No wonder Cookie, a precocious but improbably innocent girl who brings to mind centuries of fictional portraits of burgeoning artists, wants to grow up to be a rapper. Her gift with a swift comeback rhyme is what's kept her afloat in a world that threatens to drown her. Cookie lives with her great-grandmother, Big Mama (Ms. Pinkins), a strong but weary orderly at a veterans" hospital, and Crank (Marsha Stephanie Blake), a 26-year-old unemployed hairdresser, who had Cookie when she was 13. Cookie's long-absent father is Big Mama's grandson, Buggy (Corey Hawkins), a soldier who returns to Memphis shortly after the play begins. They are all confronted with crises that Hansberry's Youngers never had to face. The stoical Big Mama loses it when she discovers, too late to make other plans, that she earns just enough money not to qualify for the new apartment. Crank, who is functionally illiterate, resents the academically gifted Cookie. Crank insists she has no use for Buggy, and she shares her sometime lover and neighbor, Cornbread (Nicholas Christopher), with her friend and rival, Toyia (Saycon Sengbloh). As for Buggy, he's suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in Iraq. And he burns to avenge his mother's suicide, for which he blames Tony C (Ron Cephas Jones), the local drug lord. The ensuing turf war divides the neighborhood and pits two friends, Skillet (Lloyd Watts) and Ebony (Charlie Hudson III), against each other. For all the strictly contemporary elements that feed the overstuffed plot of "Hurt Village," the play also has an air of old-fashioned contrivance. It's definitely more persuasive and organic than "The Mountaintop," a parablelike portrait of the last night in the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But it suffers from the same penchant for artificial dialogue that seems to be pasted onto the characters. The use of projected Brechtian titles doesn't disguise a feeling that some of the scenes they preface would have creaked long before Hansberry's day. These include a pull-out-all-the-stops monologue in which Big Mama pleads for compassion in a welfare office and a vignette in which Cookie explains a science experiment (involving fleas trying to escape from a jar) with heavy symbolic resonance.