Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – James Ijames’s smart, uproarious FAT HAM inverts the tragedy of Shakespeare’s iconic play to empower Black Queerness

• By drediman
• May 27, 2022
• No Comments

Last night, James Ijames’s uproarious yet profoundly defiant Fat Ham opened at the Public Theater in a co-production with National Black Theatre. As many of you know, the play a few weeks ago was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama (the play won the coveted award despite the voters not having seen an in-person performance of the work). There was, however, The Wilma Theater’s streamed hybrid production – which gave me considerable life during the dark days of the pandemic – that preceded the current production at The Public. Mr. Ijames’s play is an ingenious adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which uses the iconic tragedy as a springboard for its exploration and empowerment of Black Queerness.

In this version, Juicy – the play’s stand-in for the Danish Prince – is a black gay college student who seems destined to crumble under the weight of his difficult circumstances. Although the piece uses Shakespeare’s play as its inspiration, Mr. Ijames slyly has his own agenda. Indeed, instead of using the Shakespeare play as a metaphor for the systemic tragedy that befalls many of those who identify as both Black and Queer, Fat Ham exuberantly breaks free of the chains of both societal and theatrical expectations. As such, the work refuses to track a parallel trajectory of Hamlet, instead choosing to invert it and move beyond Shakespeare to chart its own triumphant path. Which is not to say that the play unrecognizably alters the Bard’s pay. In fact, the playwright uses swaths of Shakespeare’s text (often times verbatim) to serve the specificity of his own tale. Coincidentally, Mr. Ijames covers the same thematic territory another recent Pulitzer Prize-winning work, this year’s odds-on favorite for the Tony Award for Best Musical A Strange Loop.

The Public / National Black Theatre co-production of Fat Ham has been directed by The Public’s Associate Artistic Director Saheem Ali, who brings the same boisterous energy to the piece as he did to last summer’s incandescent Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Merry Wives. Here, he elicits a number of hilariously exaggerated performances from his game cast (Nikki Crawford and Chris Herbie Holland are particular standouts for their amusing and larger-than-life work). But at production’s core is the soft but smoldering performance by Marcel Spears, whose Juicy is a well of deep, aching feeling and the calm but soulful eye of the vivacious storm that is Fat Ham.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

FAT HAM
Off-Broadway, Play
The Public Theater
1 hour, 35 minutes (without an intermission)
Through July 3