The Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fat Ham is a comedic retelling of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet — from the perspective of a queer, Black southern man named Juicy. The modern-day adaptation begins much like the original, with a conversation between Juicy and the ghost of his dead dad, who demands his sensitive son to kill his murderer. An audio version of the play, written by James Ijames, is now available on Audible. The Geffen Playhouse in Westwood is also staging the production, with the original Broadway cast, in March.
Ijames discovered Hamlet in college, and tells KCRW he identified with the titular character’s sense of being misunderstood and feeling like an outsider in his own family.
“They love me fiercely. My family is amazing. But I think they were a little bit like, ‘What do we do with this child?’ And so the way Hamlet moves through that play of both trying to be what people want him to be, but also obscuring parts of himself — it all felt very familiar. And so when I put that experience in the body of a Black queer person in the South, it just worked.”
Those themes run throughout many of Shakespeare’s plays, Ijames says. “Shakespeare is curious about not only the way that humans tried to convey their biggest, deepest feelings, I think he's also interested in the messiness of humanity. And so those are the things where we get the messiness with the questions of our identities and the questions of our sexualities.”
Fat Ham puts a modern twist on the Shakespearean play, but Ijames took careful consideration when incorporating lines from the original show. That includes Hamlet’s “what a piece of work is a man” monologue. Ijames says the speech took on a new meaning in his play — one that’s romantic and warm.
“Playing with the actual text in my play … did make me understand how close the Shakespearean Elizabethan English is to our own.”
Ijames traces his own understanding of Elizabethan English to his upbringing in a Black Baptist church, where he read from the King James Bible.
“I was speaking in a heightened language and hearing people that look like me read this text and pray and speak in this heightened formalized way my whole life. And somehow I had been tricked into thinking that I didn't have access to it, when in fact, I had been doing it my whole life.”
He continues, “That was this really beautiful moment that I wouldn't have come to if I hadn't tried to put the actual Shakespeare into the play and have it flow with the rest of the Black people in the South’s ways of speaking. I don't know, I'm really proud of it.”
While Fat Ham follows Juicy’s character as he navigates through the dilemma of avenging his father, Ijames says he’s also proud of his characterization of Tedra, his mother. He says he wanted her to be more self-aware and unabashed than Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother in the original story.
“I wanted to allow a Black woman to stand on stage and look at an audience, regardless of what she's doing in the play, and say, ‘You don't get to choose who I am. You don't get to decide who I am. I get to be the captain of my life and how my life should be perceived.’ … She's aware of how people see her. She's aware of the choices that she's making. She's not blind in the decisions that she's making, but she's also not ashamed of them.”
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