Fat Ham Review: James Ijames’s Gay Black Hamlet Speaks to Many on Broadway

“It’s Shakespeare,” explains Juicy (Marcel Spears), the queer, Black, Southern stand-in for Hamlet, after paraphrasing a line from that play in James Ijames’s Fat Ham. “Kind of.” His mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), who’s just gotten married to the brother of her recently deceased husband, replies with withering dismissiveness: “You watch too much PBS.”

Now in its Broadway production, following an off-Broadway run at the Public Theater last season plus the 2022 Pulitzer for drama, Fat Ham has found the sweet spot, leaning into the parallels with its dramatic ancestor when it suits the play’s deep wells of humor and tenderness but comfortably casting off Shakespeare’s shadow whenever it grows too overbearing.

“You act like he got all the answers,” Tedra scoffs of “that dead old white man,” but Juicy’s reverence—and certainly Ijames’s—for Shakespeare is real. He may not be the perfect companion for this lost young soul, working toward a degree in human resources at the University of Phoenix online and currently suffocating at a backyard barbecue celebrating his mother’s remarriage to his toxic uncle (Billy Eugene Jones), but Shakespeare offers Juicy the occasional off-ramp through language that comes ready-made to make sense of his overwhelming inertia and fish-out-of-water existential uncertainty.

At the Public, the play was intriguing as an off-kilter adaptation but ultimately felt insubstantial. For the most part, its dramaturgical inconsistencies remain. Despite the snappy, enticing dialogue as Juicy parlays with family members and neighbors, Ijames’s comic tension still slackens whenever the characters slip into soliloquy. And the meta-theatrical boundaries of the play aren’t any clearer, as Fat Ham still smudges the subtle difference between characters acknowleding the audience and being fully aware that they are, in fact, characters in a play.

Those and other issues—the play is still too long, with an extended karaoke sequence especially overstaying its welcome—were significant enough to shape the experience of Fat Ham last year, but now they’re merely momentary distractions. For Fat Ham is scrumptuously satiating now, meatier and far more meaningful than it was in its off-Broadway incarnation.

Part of that is the magic of Broadway itself. The proscenium staging (in contrast to the Public’s Anspacher, which has seating on three sides) focuses Saheem Ali’s lively, fluent direction, making the moments of audience address more specific and sharp. And a little bit of phantasmic theater magic early on sets the tone: This is a play that uses its heightened sense of whimsy and dramatic make-believe to get at the tortured souls of its characters. (Maruti Evans’s deceptively straightforward backyard set, cleverly combining 2D and 3D elements, helps too.)

It’s also the magic of the performances, especially Spears’s, which feel lived-in and detailed in a way that they didn’t a year ago. The audience is dropping in, yes, on a transformative day in all the characters’ lives, but the production now simmers with the long-gestating tensions, attractions, and annoyances that strengthen each relationship on stage. Spears has found such a specifically eloquent energy and language for Juicy, an effervescence drenched in the stiffening molasses of malaise, that it seems like the most natural thing in the world when he eventually slips seamlessly into one of Hamlet’s own speeches, truly earning its poetry.

Throughout Fat Ham, Crawford’s Tedra also fully embraces the sexual freedom that’s somewhere pulsating in Shakespeare’s Gertrude. She’s mercilessly self-absorbed, going along with her new husband’s plan to spend Juicy’s tuition money for their own redecorating, but she’s also, after years of suffering through her marriage to Juicy’s father, convinced that she deserves this newfound comfort, even if it comes at her unsettled son’s expense.

Ophelia and Laertes become Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) and Larry (Calvin Leon Smith), both deeply uncomfortable with the lives that they’re leading. She’s tough as nails, forced by her mother into dresses that she detests, and he’s a soldier, showing off an uneasy stoicism but desperate to reclaim the “softness” he once shared with Juicy in their childhood. Superbly funny, Benja Kay Thomas and Chris Herbie Holland are Rabby (Polonius as a “semi-churchy” mother) and Tio (Horatio as a horny stoner who drops occasional pearls of wisdom). Fat Ham feels richly rooted as an ensemble piece now, at times like a spoken oratorio in the way the characters come together in community and emerge in solo moments.

Ijames sets Fat Ham in North Carolina but stresses in the program note that it “could also be Virginia or Maryland or Tennessee.” Wherever it is, a hostile culture’s keeping Juicy caught halfway out of the closet. At one point, when the free-wheeling Tedra asks her son if he’s attracted to men (“You always gave me that vibe,” she clarifies), he responds, “In theory.”

It’s the patriarchs in Juicy’s life, clearly, who have done the most direct damage, both to their wives and children. As in Hamlet, Juicy’s father has just died in prison (shanked five times in the neck with a sharpened toothbrush, just like Shakespeare said), but his ghost (also Jones) is back with one more abusive demand for Juicy: take revenge on Uncle Rev, who ordered the hit and then swiftly married Tedra. Jones is stellar in his dual roles, differentiating the shared rage of the two brothers, and he leans into moments of deep-set hurt that suggest that the inheritance of brutal ideals of masculinity didn’t begin with their generation.

When the characters finally begin to abandon the script and confront our expectation that their story will end in doom and despair, the patterned genres of the Shakespearean tragedy and the American tragedy—especially the Black, queer, Southern tragedy—begin to overlap. Shakespeare, kind of like America, often leaves his people on an unshakably fatal path forward. But Ijames’s surprising finale, a feisty twist of theatrical rule-breaking, soars on the Broadway stage, reclaiming the narrative away from Shakespeare, away from the cultural constrictions of the American South, and celebrates the play’s characters in all their hammy, juicy humanity.

Fat Ham is now running at the American Airlines Theatre.