Is Hamlet the most popular character in New York City this summer? There’s the new Brett Dean–composed contemporary opera at the Metropolitan Opera. The Robert Icke–directed Almeida Theatre production of Shakespeare’s tragedy at the Park Avenue Armory. And at the Public Theater, in a co-production between the Public and the National Black Theatre, the highly anticipated New York premiere of James Ijames 2022 Pulitzer Prize–winning Fat Ham.
First produced by Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater, Ijames’ play—a cheeky, clever 100-minute tragicom that’s far more comic than tragic—isn’t Hamlet. It simply follows that play’s major plot points: Juicy (Marcel Spears) has just lost his father, Pap (Billy Eugene Jones), who appears as a ghost demanding vengeance. Juicy’s mom, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), marries Pap’s brother Rev (also played by Jones) when Pap is barely in the ground. As it turns out, Rev is the one behind his own brother’s death. “The inmate that stabbed me said… ‘Rev said what’s up.’ Like he was in one of them HBO shows with the dragons and whatnot,” recalls Pap, who’d been in prison for knifing a guy with bad breath. All, uh, pretty much like you remember reading in ninth-grade English lit.
But Juicy isn’t a depressive Danish prince. He’s a pensive Southern twentysomething college student—at the online University of Phoenix, much to Pap’s dismay—who’s too “soft” (read: gay) for his daddy’s taste. “You pansy. Girly ass puddle of spit,” sniffs Pap. So…the father-son dynamic is pretty fraught. Also: Our hero is not playing mind games with some mentally unstable flower-picking Ophelia, and she’s not pining away over a wishy-washy guy who won’t give her the time of day. Ijames’ iteration of Ophelia, Opal (Adrianna Mitchell), is a badass, and she Juicy are friends, conspirators, and confidants who bond over feeling like outcasts, trapped in their own skin, at odds with their parents, and ill-equipped for the roles they’re expected to play—i.e., the frilly dress–wearing daughter and the dutiful stepson.
Juicy’s also a mama’s boy—it says so on his shirt!—who wants the well-meaning if oblivious Tedra to be happy, even when she does completely inappropriate things like giving her new husband a lap dance at the backyard barbecue wedding reception. (It involves a karaoke machine and Crystal Waters’ 1994 dance-pop hit “100% Pure Love,” which RuPaul’s Drag Race fans might remember from a 2021 episode.) Or inquiring in a very loud voice about his love life: “Learn something from ya momma about keeping a man. You like men, right?”
Ijames turns to Shakespeare for a few chunks of text, but the lines are used sparingly, surprisingly, and smartly (you won’t hear “to be or not to be”). Fat Ham might be a descendant of Hamlet, but it’s in every way Ijames’ creation. It’s not a spoiler to say Fat Ham—directed by Public Theater resident director Saheem Ali (Merry Wives)—doesn’t end as Shakespeare prescribed: in a bloodbath. Refreshingly, Ijames chooses joy and glitter and love and light.
Fat Ham opened May 26, 2022, at the Public Theater and runs through July 17. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
