Review of Fat Ham, a play by James Ijames

 

Fat Ham

Review of Fat Ham, a play by James Ijames

At Calderwood Pavilion of the Huntington Theater through October 29, 2023

By Andy Hoffman

Fat Ham, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for a new play, appears in an ebullient production at the Calderwood Pavilion, a joint effort of the Huntington Theatre, Alliance Stage, the Front Porch Arts Collaborative. The play, modeled on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, takes place during a barbecue in the backyard of a nondescript house someplace in the middle South. The party celebrates the wedding of Tedra and Rev, the brother of Tedra’s recently killed husband Pap. Pap dies violently in prison, serving a sentence for murdering someone in the family’s restaurant. As in Hamlet, Pap’s ghost appears to his son, Juicy – as one might describe a fatty ham roast – to claim that Rev directed the murder, perhaps to get Tedra to marry him. Pap bids Juicy to avenge his murder by killing Rev, an act that appeals to Juicy’s emotions but runs counter to his sweet and peaceful nature. The playwright and the theater deserve gigantic praise for undertaking a play the tries to see this well-known story through different eyes. This all Black cast and production embraces this extraordinary challenge with enthusiasm, though sometimes it feels as though Fat Ham attempts more than it achieves. The fact that I come to the theater as a cis white man of an older generation might make me less than the perfect audience. I had high expectations for this production, but left the theater disappointed and unmoved.

The actors connect with the audience more through song and dance than their characters, who seem thinly drawn. The young people wrestle with their gender and sexual identities. Juicy seems unable to express his feelings about his kindness, so much in contrast with his father and uncle. Larry comes out, but only to Juicy, and Larry’s sister Opal (read Ophelia) tells her mother that she prefers women, while Tio’s pansexuality becomes a running joke through the play, but the action of the play itself doesn’t account for either the identities or the expressions of them. Vocal performances by Marshall W. Mabry IV as Juicy and Ebony Marshall-Oliver as Tedra become the most memorable moments of Fat Ham, even though they do little to advance the story or reveal the characters. Still, there’s an undeniable energy about the performance and the presentation of peculiar family dynamics at work in this particular African-American clan.

I left the Calderwood feeling more disappointed than elated. Because of the Pulitzer Prize, I went in with extremely high expectations, but left entertained while still wondering why Fat Ham had captured so many accolades. James Ijames isn’t the first playwright to build a modern play on the back of a Shakespeare classic. Tom Stoppard created a brilliant sideways view of Hamlet in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which the Huntington staged a few seasons ago. Perhaps comparison disadvantages both plays, but when two celebrated new plays choose to spin off of Hamlet, they invite comparison. While Stoppard’s comedic drama takes an existential look at Shakespearean themes, Ijames dramatic comedy plays more like a series of workshop mashups. The play’s minor characters, such as Juicy’s cousin Tio (Hamlet’s Horatio) and friend Larry (Hamlet’s Laertes) – have comic roles that seemed to me extraneous to the play itself. Aside from Juicy’s occasional soliloquies, lifted directly from Shakespeare, the connection to the original seems largely allusive and elusive. I can’t second-guess the Pulitzer Prize committee, so I can simply try to find a justification for their decision. Any theater-goer will admire the wild humor and imagination woven through Fat Ham, which climaxes in Tio’s marijuana-fueled monologue about video games, snowballs, and the deep satisfaction of sexual congress with a gingerbread man. Taking a standard of the literary canon and remaking it into an expression of racial and sexual identity deserves serious accolades.

This production extracts laughter and moans of recognition on both these points. When Larry embraces his gender fluidity, the audience is with him, and when Tedra explains to Juicy why she has taken up with her dead husband’s brother, we feel the limited choices she believes she has as a woman of color. These moments, however, are largely disconnected from the play of which they are part. As a member of the audience, it is difficult to assess whether the play or its direction misses the mark. Both James Ijames, the playwright, and Stevie Walker-Webb, the director, have received repeated honors for their work in the theater. I may have missed something, since this production left me wanting something more or different. The Huntington’s Fat Ham provides a good evening of entertainment, and it will satisfy if you go with that expectation. I had attended expecting more, and left The Calderwood Pavilion let down.