‘Fat Ham’ Broadway Review: Black, Queer Serving Of Shakespeare Is A Delicious Piece Of Work
Like that relative who picks through the chicken parts at a family picnic to find the leg or the breast or the thigh with just the right amount of crisp, playwright James Ijames has no reluctance to rummage through the bones of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to cook up the irresistible Fat Ham.
Audacious at points, quietly amenable at others, the Pulitzer Prize winning comedy carries the burden of our expectations more lightly than some other prize recipients who’ve made their way to Broadway recently, including Between Riverside and Crazy, Cost of Living and even A Strange Loop, the stage work that Fat Ham shares its concerns over masculinity (mostly of the toxic variety ), queerness, and the search for – or insistence upon – love and acceptance within the family and, very specifically, the Black faith community.
Inspired by, and borrowing its groundwork from, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Fat Ham and its author swipe plot points, characters and, in a startling and lovely interlude, a soliloquy, to tell the tale of Juicy (Marcel Spears), a young, Black, queer man described as “thicc” by his loving mom Tedra (Nikki Crawford), “soft” by both his abusive, vengeance-seeking father’s ghost Pap and equally unlikeable uncle Rev (both played by Billy Eugene Jones), and “opulent” by an admirer who shouldn’t be revealed for fear of a spoiler.
Set at a backyard barbecue somewhere (possibly) in North Carolina, Fat Ham follows its sensitive, mostly complacent, frequently melancholy and thoroughly indecisive (sound familiar yet?) protagonist as he struggles to find his place in the world, or at least within his own family.
