Review: ‘Fat Ham’ on Broadway Is Pretty Delicious

This is an amended version of a review that first appeared on May 26, 2022.

The flight of the checkered tablecloth is the first shock. 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, which won 2022’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and is now on Broadway (American Airlines Theatre, booking to June 25).

The play, a co-production of the National Black Theatre and New York City’s Public Theater—where it played with the same cast last year—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), who’s Gertrude-adjacent, and her dead husband’s brother, Rev (Billy Eugene Jones), a kind of Claudius.

‘Fat Ham’ Won the Pulitzer Prize. Now You Can Feast on It.‘THERE’S THE RUB’

Tim Teeman, Malcolm Jones

Until the Public, 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 Daily Beast interview last May—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 presence 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 the original Shakespearean plot, 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.

Maruti Evans’ design shows the back garden (and includes one or two in-built surprises); Bradley King’s lighting keeps us in both regular daylight, before switching to stark blackouts when ghostly appearances and other strange things start happening. The characters are aware of us as an audience, with Tedra demanding Juicy doesn’t leave a wrong impression of her. It’s an internal, playful form of audience participation that increases the intimacy of the play, particularly when it comes to hoping for the best for Juicy.

Of the setting, Ijames writes in the Playbill: “We are in a house in North Carolina. Could also be Virginia, or Maryland, or Tennessee. It is not Mississippi, or Alabama, or Florida. That’s a different thing altogether.” As for the time, he adds: “The American South, to me, exists in a kind of liminal space between the past and the present with an aspirational relationship to the future that is contingent to your history living in the South. All that to say…I’m writing this play from inside the second decade of the 21^st century. This world aesthetically sits anywhere in the four to six decades preceding the current moment.”

The play is a compact 95 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 an extremely passionate soliloquy-when-high 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.

“When I decided to do the adaptation, it just came really easy to me that I should set it in a place that was very familiar to me, and with people I knew,” Ijames told The Daily Beast last year. “So it’s set in the South at a barbecue in the backyard of a family. My own family isn’t quite as troubled and murderous as in Hamlet, but that musicality of language, that overlapping speech of one person falling over and into someone else’s thought just seemed to work, and felt like the same sort of thing Shakespeare is trying to accomplish with his meter. I am trying to do the same with Black Southern electric conversation that happens in summer at barbecues. The two meet very beautifully. I was kind of surprised once people started reading it out loud. I was like, ‘Oh it works!’”

Fat Ham is not autobiographical, Ijames emphasized. “I want to make that clear, so no one thinks my family is like this. The action beats grow out of Hamlet, the Shakespeare play, though some of the cadence and the way the characters speak are very true to what I grew up listening to.”

The play is both very funny and piercingly moving. 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 University of Phoenix courses to study (which is actually pretty funny). As his mother, Crawford plays a woman emerging from grief into what she insists—despite all the tensions around her—will be the best time of her life. She seems both certain of it, and also desperaely trying to convince herself. Some of the painful scenes of the show see her trying to glide past her new husband’s abuse of her son that plays out in front of her.

Directed with a bristling energy by Saheem Ali, Fat Ham doesn’t exactly reimagine Hamlet so much as take its skeins and outline and make something new. Spears is thornily 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.

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 celebration of this multi-defined softness, 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.

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. A spangly disco commences.

It is a strange ending—at first orbiting the line of working and not working—with the audience again addressed mock-dismissively as if we should expect any more from the actors; this isn’t a Marvel movie we are told. A play about power and murderous revenge becomes a play about a multi-coming out and pride, safety, community—and, right at the end, joy and dancing. The final invitation to the audience is to join in.