‘Fat Ham’ Won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Now You Can Feast on It.
It’s as if a diaphanous paper plane has suddenly shot across the stage. This is a ghost, the first ding of Hamlet in the fabric of James Ijames’ reimagining of that Shakespeare play, Fat Ham (Public Theater, to July 3), which recently won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
The play, a co-production of the National Black Theatre and Public Theater, is set not in the Danish court of yore, but in the present day at a Southern backyard barbecue celebration of the wedding of Tedra (Nikki Crawford) and her dead husband’s brother, Rev (Billy Eugene Jones).
Until now, Fat Ham had only been performed as a streaming production by the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, where Ijames—who spoke about the conception of the play in a recent Daily Beast interview—is a co-artistic director. Instead of the tragedy-and-then-some of Hamlet, this is a play that emphasizes life, and specifically Black queer joy, while interrogating all the things that conspire to negate the life and feelings of the central character of Juicy (Marcel Spears), who is Hamlet-ish rather than a direct transposition, resistant to following the iconic Shakespeare character’s full tragic trajectory. Echoing Shakespeare, Jones also plays Pap, Tedra’s dead husband, who has returned to chivvy and torment his son as a ghost, encouraging him to murder the man who has supplanted him.
James Ijames on the ‘Wildest Dream’ of His Pulitzer Win—and Reinventing ‘Hamlet’ in ‘Fat Ham’
The play is a compact 90 minutes, but it’s as dense and thoughtful as it is light on its feet and irreverent. Tio (Chris Herbie Holland), a modern-day echo of Horatio, begins the play by trying to figure out if the world of porn is for him, and later delivers a stunning soliloquy about the sexual pleasures of getting down with gingerbread men.
Tio lays out Juicy’s predicament at the beginning. “Your Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went jail, his Pop went to jail, and what’s before that? Huh? Slavery. It’s inherited trauma. You carrying around your whole family’s trauma, man. And that’s OK. You OK. But you don’t got to let it define you.” The play explores how Juicy follows Tio’s wise words and avoids the tragedy of Hamlet, and the violence within it, especially when Rev takes every opportunity to demean Juicy so cruelly. If anyone is asking for retribution, it is him.
The other characters include Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) as a stand-in for Ophelia, and Larry (Calvin Leon Smith) for Laertes. Their mother Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas) watches the riotous proceedings balefully, but after both Opal and Larry, a soldier, have their own secrets to reveal, a rush to maternal judgment doesn’t happen as maybe expected, but rather she matches them with a revelation of her own.
Benja Kay Thomas in “Fat Ham.”
The play is very funny and also wrenching. As we watch Rev’s mistreatment of Juicy we also sense Juicy is going to be fine. He is not having a bar of anyone’s rejection, yet still yearns for warmth and a sense of grounding. He is the best kind of prickly; he is even mocked for taking online courses to study (actually, that is quite funny in the play). As his mother, Crawford, also the show’s dance captain, plays a woman emerging from grief into what she insists—despite all the tensions around her—will be the best time of her life.
Directed by Saheem Ali with design by Maruti Evans, Fat Ham doesn’t exactly reimagine Hamlet so much as take its skeins and outline and make something new. Spears is wonderful as Juicy; a young man who is absolutely in and of himself. Wait for his declarative burst of karaoke; it is one of those theatrical moments you at first laugh at because it seems so extreme, then you watch Spears inhabit the song, and the artist, and it feels every bit as revelatory as his ringingly clear remolding of some intact original Shakespeare monologues. We even get a perfectly timed and placed, “There’s the rub,” referring to spice rub.
Throughout the play, the characters occasionally acknowledge us, or directly address us. We can see how sad Juicy is, but also how intelligent and over-everything he is. He is nobody’s fool, tool, or victim. We see the love he has for Larry, and we see—in Larry’s adoration of him—a beautiful deconstruction of the “softness” Juicy embodies, and the play promotes.
Fat Ham is a manifesto for softness, kindness, and reconciliation rather than violence, division, and rancor. The strength of Juicy is not that he backs down from confrontation, and not that he isn’t capable of violence; he is, and he is a victim of it, physically (a shocking thud of a moment) and verbally. He just ultimately chooses to turn away from both. The simplicity of his repudiation of one behavior and embrace of another is both refreshing and a blunt reminder. Change is possible; we just must want to do it, and draw the damn lines in the sand.
The cast of “Fat Ham.”
Yes, there is a climactic fight, but the stage does not come to be littered with the blood and bodies of regular-Hamlet, but instead with some sighs and clearing up, life going on, with smiles, laughter, and dancing. The carnage-heavy ending of Hamlet is rewritten. Fat Ham does not end, so much as wind down, with firm declarations that they are all done with dumb violence. The dead are casually raised. The disco commences.
A play about power and murderous revenge is replaced by a play about a multi-defined coming out and multi-defined pride, and the importance of finding places of safety, love, and community. And, right at the end, so much dancing.
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