Abstract
To be Hamlet or not to be Hamlet? As the Huntington Theatre Artistic Director Loretta Greco aptly answers the question, Fat Ham ‘is Hamlet and is not Hamlet’. James Ijames's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2021 original script is a free-wheeling, quasi-musical adaptation of Shakespeare's play shifted to an American South black family backyard-barbecue setting (‘Virginia, or Maryland or Tennessee’, the programme advises sternly, ‘not Mississippi, or Alabama or Florida’, because ‘[t]hat's a different thing altogether’).
While resituating Hamlet to revolve around a power-play for ownership among the patriarchs of a family barbecue restaurant and re-envisioning Juicy's (Hamlet's, with Marshall W. Mabry IV in the role) struggles as complicated by his gender-fluid gay black male identity, Fat Ham keeps the basic structure of the character roles and plot – these are conveyed sparingly to the Shakespeare-uninitiated in the programme's 12-frame summary in comic format (by Mya Lixian Gosling). Ijames’s play treats Hamlet's remaining elements with often witty irreverence: After Juicy's ‘What a piece of work is man’ set speech he delivers straight to the audience as ‘Shakespeare, sort of’, his mother Tedra (Gertrude, played by Ebony Marshall-Oliver) chastises Juicy, ‘Don’t go quoting that old white man’ and accusing him of having watched ‘too much PBS’ [Public Broadcasting Service, the BBC equivalent in the US] to peals of audience laughter. Underscored by green lighting (by Xiangfu Xiao), Juicy's delivery of his occasional speeches from Hamlet frequently breaks the fourth wall to address the audience, as if attempting to conspire with us to sneak in lines from Shakespeare when the onstage characters are paying less attention, or when commenting with deadpan irony on the preservation of Senecan tragedy's material in his modern-day play.
The ghost of Juicy's father, Pap (James T. Alfred, doubling as Rev/Claudius), first appears comically rising up from under a silver grey tarpaulin that covers some disused backyard furniture (scenic design by Luciana Steccoli), joking with Juicy about having to ‘look ghostly’ and arguing with his son about the need to avenge his death, ‘you got shit to do’, to which Juicy responds incredulously, ‘you dead!’ In exasperation, he turns to the audience to adjudicate the demand for revenge, ‘what do you think’? Juicy's disapproval of Tedra's remarriage to Rev, ‘tacky ass’, is evidence he too was raised to make ‘bad choices’, which he reflects on, asking rhetorically, ‘what do you do when God doesn’t want you and the devil won’t have you?’ Pap disappears back under a sheet hanging from a laundry line after grousing about Juicy's ‘speaking ill of the dead’. Later, the scene of Pap's return to remind Juicy of his intransigence (Hamlet's 3.4) is probably the best rendition of this moment ever staged: Pap reanimates as a pig's head roasting on a barbecue rack, rising up in the billowing smoke.
Juicy's resistance to the call for revenge is firmly linked to his disavowal of a future in his family's barbecue restaurant, now headed by Rev – ‘there's the rub’ is, reasonably enough, an herb meat seasoning – and to the near-hereditary prison incarceration rates plaguing black men. A butcher's knife is Juicy's family heirloom. Pap's demand that Rev die (who somehow murders Pap while Pap is imprisoned for killing a customer in their restaurant) also openly sanctions cannibalism, to have Juicy ‘make [him] a plate’ of Rev's body roasted like a pig, recalling Senecan atrocities against close kin that Shakespeare highlights earlier in Titus Andronicus.
The cheerfully always-awed Tio (Horatio, played by Lau’rie Roach), whose philosophical outlook seems largely the result of constantly being stoned, counsels Juicy that maybe he might ‘kill [Rev] metaphorically’ instead of committing murder – interestingly a product of his wisdom achieved through therapy about cycles of violence in their community, stemming from institutional racism's roots in slavery. Juicy's ‘softness’ is critiqued by both patriarchs but recognised as ‘sensitive’ by the matriarchs, Tedra and Rabby (Polonius, played by Thomika Marie Bridwell), and by Juicy's counterparts, his cousins Opal (Ophelia, played by Victoria Omoregie) and the closeted Larry (Laertes, played by Amar Atkins), with whom he had a largely unrealised childhood erotic experience (not with Opal). As a gay woman herself, Opal complains about the flowery dress she wears over bike shorts (Ijames does not go so far as to pen a line saying his Ophelia figure is drowning in flowers, but she does allude to women ‘blooming’) to please Rabby, her mother, a ’60s/Jackie Kennedy-styled matron with straightened hair, pearls, and a tight-fitting orange dress (costume design by Celeste Jennings; hair and wig design by Earon D. Nealey), the Black Southern equivalent of middle-class aspirant Hyacinth Bucket from the BBC's Keeping Up Appearances.
The company of Fat Ham, Huntington Theatre Company. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.
Juicy (Marshall W. Mabry IV) and Opal (Victoria Omoregie), in Fat Ham, Huntington Theatre Company. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.
More easily than the repressed Navy conscript Larry (Rabby plots his career to becoming a general), Opal understands Juicy's sexuality but mocks his ‘human resources’ college major because he is ‘not good with people’, and she dresses him down before the ‘Mousetrap’ scene for thinking he is ‘more complex than he is’. After Juicy performs Hamlet's 2.2 speech about his plan to reveal the ‘preacher killed the cook’, Opal announces Juicy is ‘weird’ and says he will become like the family he resents; she reminds him, ‘you can just leave’ (a defensible suggestion not, it seems, considered by Hamlet). Dressed in black Goth-y band t-shirts, jeans, a flowing chiffon coat, and combat boats, ‘Fat Ham’ Juicy identifies as an ‘empath’, breaking into an extended, heartfelt cover of Radiohead's ‘Creep’ (sound design by Aubrey Dube) for a family bout of karaoke (this follows their game of charades, when Juicy challenges them to guess a book title and gives up, complaining, ‘like you read’). To the song's rhetorical refrain, ‘What am I doing here?’, Rev retorts, ‘you can leave’. He tells Juicy to start wearing something ‘more festive’ and that he ‘has a new daddy’, before baiting a reluctant Juicy into sparring and punching him in the stomach.
One of the play's running jokes is Juicy's pursuit of a ‘human resources’ degree at the University of Phoenix (the notorious online US business, perhaps Ijames's knowing gesture to his own resurrection of Hamlet from the ashes for a new audience), an ambition thwarted by Tedra's capitulation to the couple's desire to spend Juicy's tuition money (‘college is a scam’, she shrugs) on refurbishments like a new ‘rain showerhead’. (Presumably the restaurant has already furnished the funeral-baked meats.) When Juicy enquires whether she is happy, she replies, ‘what's happy?’ Tedra vaguely likens missing her first absent, then dead husband as ‘just there, like heartburn’, and she rationalises her remarriage as she ‘is not built to be alone’, and incest, ‘they did it in the Bible all the time!’ After Juicy soliloquises about a childhood brown Barbie doll that Pap destroyed, Tedra breaks back onstage to admonish Juicy, ‘what did you tell them?’, gesturing to the audience, about her remarriage. Ijames's script writes Tedra to recognise that ‘[we] are going to judge her life choices’, yet she turns this into consistently effective comedy. Clad in platform espadrilles and an abbreviated aqua playsuit, she breaks into a joyful, sexually suggestive full-on dance number cover of Salt-N-Pepa's ‘Whatta Man’.
If Juicy's relationship to the aggressive males in his family is fraught with anxiety as well as a mixture of fear and defiance of their disapproval, his relationship with Tedra is surprisingly supportive and tender: homosexuality in Fat Ham is clearly received with more hostility by the older black males. As a recapitulation, perhaps, of inheriting the ‘poison’ of these generational attitudes associated with Rev and Pap (and with far more actually destructive outcomes in Claudius’ suborning of Laertes to kill Hamlet with the envenomed foil), childhood friends Larry and Juicy fall out briefly when Juicy outs Larry, who smashes Juicy's head on a picnic table in retribution after Rabby calls him a ‘sissy’. Denial rather than outright disrespect characterises Rabby's relationship to Larry, however, and the play's largely happy ending recuperates their relationship with her acceptance of his gayness, ‘everyone has to wear their own armour of God’, celebrated in the play's closing moments when he returns divested of his Navy uniform for a rousing RuPaul-styled drag performance (replete with a disco ball).
Tio tries to make peace after Larry and Juicy's dust-up, likening life to a hallucinogenic virtual reality game best played while being extremely high. He applauds everyone's ‘vulnerability’ and calls for a bottle of ‘dark liquor’ that leads everyone to a round of truth-telling about their real feelings, identities past and present (prim Rabby reveals she was once a stripper), and the play's inevitable final family brawl. As Juicy's supportive friend, Tio informs Juicy their high school friend Yorick has died of a drug overdose (Tio buys his trainers from Yorick's mother's yard sale to help finance his funeral), news that takes on the contemporary spectre of a memento mori, and he confirms witness of Pap's spirit when Rev mocks Juicy for believing the word of a ghost.
Rev takes great umbrage at Juicy's having told Tedra about his suspicions and taunts Juicy for his ‘useless’ inaction even if he were guilty of Pap's murder; Tedra notes this sounds ‘a little bit guilty’ before trying to break them up for fear the police will get called, and the couple clash openly over whether Juicy must leave the family house. Clearly still refusing the imperative to kill, Juicy declines to attack Rev with the heirloom butcher knife, proclaiming, ‘Let the devil have him’. Retribution immediately takes the form of Rev's choking on a barbecued rib from the family restaurant, eating his own increase, as it were. He dies out of a stubborn refusal to allow Juicy's attempts to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre, gesturing a dying accusation, ‘he's gay’, to which Tio shakes his head, ‘that's unfortunate’.
Like rebellious characters penned by Pirandello, Juicy reminds the onstage cast that they are all tragic in the eyes of the audience, whose knowledge or programme-reminder of Hamlet's plot and structure demands that they now all die, to which Tio protests, ‘well, technically, Horatio …’ A reclaimed Ophelia, Opal declares she won’t ‘die for nobody’, while Tedra demands who exactly dictates their deaths. At Juicy's suggestion they at least try to keep to ‘plot, structure’, they comically mime attacking each other with plastic picnic cutlery, stepping around Rev's prone body, screaming cathartically. Tedra feels disburdened, stating frankly that the ‘dead still remind [her] of the dead’, and alluding to Gertrude's opacity once again, says cryptically she ‘thought [she] knew what [she] wanted to say when [she] got everyone's attention, but …’ Juicy delivers a final rhetorical gesture to Shakespeare, proclaiming ‘what sleep of death may come’ as Tio hungrily eats a salad. Standing up to join the dance party heralded by Larry's flamboyant return (he has ‘lost track of time and just thrown something on’), Rev reclaims the ghost's pig's head from the barbecue rack and dances along with the cast – you just can’t keep a good barbecue down.