Off-Broadway Play Review—“Fat Ham” at the Public Theater

Fat Ham

Written by James Ijames

Directed by Saheem Ali

Performances through July 3, 2022

Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, NY

publictheater.org

Marcel Spears (Juicy) and Adrianna Mitchell (Opal) in Fat Ham (photo: Joan Marcus)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama, Fat Ham, James Ijames’ brash riff on Hamlet, is set at a backyard barbecue at a middle-class Black home in North Carolina. The protagonist is Juicy, a young queer Black man mourning the recent death of his murderous father, Pap, as well as dealing with his confusion over the quick wedding of his mother, Tedra, and his uncle (and Pap’s brother), Rev.

So far, so familiar for anyone remotely versed in Shakespeare, but Ijames makes enough changes to well-worn plotlines and characters—Ophelia is no longer in love with the eponymous hero but instead is Opal, a lesbian friend of Juicy’s—to move his play onto its own dramatic path. So it’s strangely distancing that Fat Ham dances around Hamlet’s heavy emotional baggage instead of becoming something more compellingly, completely original.

For every witty bit repurposed from Shakespeare—like the amusing appearance of Juicy’s father’s ghost, imploring his son to avenge his death—there are moments echoing Saturday Night Live sketches, as when Rev says about his marinated smoked pork that “The secret’s in the rub” and Juicy turns to the audience to respond (wink wink, nudge nudge), “Aye, there’s the rub.” It’s too bad that such scattered “soliloquies” owe more to the extraneous horseplay of Central Park Shakespeare stagings than to the genius of Hamlet itself.

Also, there’s not really much sense of an aching loss, which gives Juicy’s plight even less urgency. Ijames’ updates include a showstopping karaoke scene of Tedra singing Crystal Waters’ “100% Pure Love” with Juicy, who then sings (no surprise) “Creep” by Radiohead, and a drag show finale of straitlaced soldier Larry (a kind of Laertes), who’s secretly in love with and outed by Juicy, and who finally is able to express his own truth. For all their audience pleasing, however, such moments come across as rather desperate instead of flowing naturally from the relationships onstage. 

Saving Fat Ham is the verve with which it’s been staged by director Saheem Ali, its 90 minutes flying by quickly so that, whenever something is too on the nose, off we move onto something else. There’s also the uniformly fine cast led by the terrific Nikki Crawford as a funny, sexy Tedra and the excellent Marcel Spears, who assumes the mantle of both Shakespeare and Ijames to make Juicy more than a mere takeoff but a believably sympathetic traumatized son.

The real (if non-fatal) flaw of Fat Ham—much like the Danish prince himself—stems from its author not making up his mind to go in a daring new direction with his Hamlet reinterpretation.