James Ijames’ defiant and raucous play Fat Ham, now at the American Airlines Theater on Broadway, begins in transition. Relics of a recent funeral are slid into corners to make space for tributes to a celebratory future. The scene, designed by Maruti Evans, is set for a cookout: Smoke rises languorously from a grill, snakes up the red brick wall and disappears behind the curtain. Tables are cloaked with the signature blue and red checkered plastic linings of summer parties and picnics. Mismatched balloons dot the verdant green grass. In a corner stands a wreath honoring the recently deceased.
Related Stories
Juicy, the mercurial protagonist played with relaxed style by Marcel Spears, reluctantly prepares to celebrate the marriage of his mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), to his uncle, Rev (Billy Eugene Jones). His dad, Pap (also played by Jones), hasn’t been dead for a week and the newlyweds behave as though he never existed. Juicy isn’t one to defend his father — the two had a contentious and abusive relationship — but the atmosphere feels poisoned with malevolence.
Because Fat Ham, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is Ijames’ loose adaptation of Hamlet, we know that Juicy is right. We aren’t surprised when Pap’s ghost appears either, first when he accidently haunts Juicy’s friend Tio (a scene-stealing Chris Herbie Holland) and later with his son.
“You should be scared,” Pap chides Juicy during an early spectral encounter. “There some scary stuff happening.” As Pap tells it, Rev, jealous and vicious, had him murdered in prison and it’s Juicy’s responsibility to avenge him: “I want you to catch that hog brother of mine by the snout and gut that motherfucker,” Pap screeches, his veins popping out of his neck. “He’s a literal motherfucker. He’s literally fucking your mother. Do you feel funny about that?”
Of course Juicy feels funny about that. He’s not a fan of his uncle, who along with family, property and business, seems to have inherited Pap’s penchant for picking on Juicy. He accuses his nephew of being “soft,” hurling the word so violently it lands like a slur. But Juicy’s not sure about avenging the death of someone who wasn’t very good to him in life, either. The young, self-described empath would like to consider other options.
Reimagine is a word that has been tossed around so brazenly — by people and institutions looking to rebrand and revise history — that its invocation can elicit more knowing smirks than exciting thrills. But Ijames’ Fat Ham is a reimagining in the most appropriate sense of the word. The production sources its skeleton from Shakespeare but fills itself out with materials borrowed from Black Southern history — rich, varied and queer.
Fat Ham is still about the fraught relations between fathers and their sons, but in recasting the tale as one of a poor Black queer man in the South, Ijames opens the classic and pulls from it a story about breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma.
The brash and bold production — Pap’s ghost sinks into the earth and materializes from the grill; karaoke interludes appear here and there; a rousing musical finale — reminded me of the scholar Zandria Robinson’s recent observation in Little Richard: I Am Everything, a documentary about one of rock ‘n’ roll’s pioneers: “The South is the home of all things queer, of the different, of the non-normative. Queerness is not just about sexuality but about a presence in a space that is different from what we require or expect.”
Ijames subverts viewer expectations in Fat Ham, but he also pushes his characters to move beyond their prescribed roles and fates. Juicy leads the charge in this, posing questions to Pap, Rev, Tedra and his friends Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) and Larry (Calvin Leon Smith) about what life could be like instead of what it is.
At the start of the play, which runs a brisk 95 minutes, Juicy has already rejected the family barbecue business. He’s set his sights on finishing an online degree in Human Resources. His friends and family mock him — “You not good with people,” Opal says at one point — but the degree symbolizes more than just a job. It’s a chance at an alternative future and a sign of the other paths Juicy wants to chart for himself. He invites the audience into his thought process with long asides in which he speaks directly to us.
When Fat Ham, produced by the National Black Theater, played at the Public Theater in New York (another producer) last year, Juicy’s contemplations about his family, his life and whether he would murder his uncle felt more like conversations than monologues. Some of the intimacy is lost in the transfer to Broadway, but director Saheem Ali does his best to narrow the gap between the stage and the audience.
The performers routinely break the fourth wall: There are knowing looks, self-referential bits, eye rolls and quizzical expressions directed at audience members. This is the same energy the ensemble has with each other, too. Fat Ham revels in suggestion, side-eyes, winks and asides. It pays to look closely and quickly, scanning each performer’s face for what they’re not saying aloud.
This version of Fat Ham plays like a modern sitcom, although with more tragic undertones. The slapstick humor and expressive deliveries leave little room for boredom, which is a double-edged sword. Fat Ham doesn’t slow down enough for some of its more emotional moments to really stick the landing — the play seems hyperaware of its potential dourness. But that can be forgiven because of just how impressively the performers commit to their bits.
Special kudos go to Holland and Benja Kay Thomas, who plays Larry and Opal’s mother Rabby. Her performance as a cantankerous, yet affectionate, maternal and aunt figure is pitch-perfect, and her snarky asides are worth your attention.
For the most part, Fat Ham’s language doesn’t try to mimic Shakespeare’s — save a couple of moments when Juicy quotes original text. Here, it charts its own path too. Its rhythm can be hard to detect, but once you find it — in Pap’s barbed commands, in Larry’s circumspect admissions, in Tedra’s agitated denials and in Juicy’s near-hopeful judgements — you’ll be glad you came to the cookout.
Venue: American Airlines Theater
Cast: Nikki Crawford, Chris Herbie Holland, Billy Eugene Jones, Adrianna Mitchell, Calvin Leon, Marcel Spears, Benja Kay Thomas
Playwright: James Ijames
Director: Saheem Ali
Set designer: Maruti Evans
Costume designer: Dominique Fawn Hill
Lighting designer: Bradley King
Sound designer: Mikaal Sulaiman
Production: The Public Theater, National Black Theatre
Presented by No Guarantees, Public Theater Productions, Rashad V. Chambers, National Black Theatre, Tim Levy, Bards on Broadway, Bob Boyett, Ghostbuster Productions, James Ijames, Cynthia Stroum, Audible, Adam Cohen, Black DeViller, Firemused Productions/Jamrock Productions, The Forstalls, Iconic Vizions/Corey Brunish, John Gore Organization, Midnight Theatricals, David Miner, Robin Gorman Newman/Picklestar Theatricals, Marc Platt, Play on Shakespeare, The Wilma Theater, Colman Domingo, Cynthia Erivo
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qbvLpbCwp5%2BZv6a8zqurnqpemLyue8uinZ6rpK65pnvAq6usZ5aWwW60wKZkm6qflrG4rdhmq6Gdkamys3nRnq2inadifnN%2FlGxwam1panw%3D