Marcel Spears (right) plays Juicy and Billy Eugene Jones is the ghost of Juicy’s father in James Ijames’s Fat Ham, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
James Ijames has borrowed rudiments of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to jump-start his roistering new comedy Fat Ham. A coproduction of the Public Theater and the National Black Theatre, Fat Ham is a dramaturgical ragbag, blending bits of the greatest tragedy in the English language with Southern Gothic caricature and sitcom tropes from Tyler Perry and the chitlin circuit. Saheem Ali has directed the show’s endearing cast with verve and velocity comparable to his lightning-paced Merry Wives in Central Park last summer.
Juicy (Marcel Spears), Ijames’s protagonist, is scion of a barbecue dynasty. A self-proclaimed “empath,” he, like the melancholy Dane, is pursuing an undergraduate degree (though Juicy’s university is online and his major, human resources, is a far cry from the curriculum of Renaissance Wittenberg).
Juicy submits to bridal-day kisses from his mother (Nikki Crawford), despite his alarm that, just a few days after his father’s death, she has married his paternal uncle. Photographs by Joan Marcus.
Juicy’s father, Pap (Billy Eugene Jones), recently went to prison for slitting the throat of one of his restaurant employees, supposedly in a rage over the victim’s odoriferous breath. Juicy’s mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), remarks that Pap “killed that man in the middle of the restaurant. Got blood all over the pulled pork.” Now Pap has been murdered by a fellow prison inmate.
At the start of the play, Pap’s ghost tells Juicy that his death came at the hands of a hitman hired by his brother Rev (also played by Jones). Pap’s death has cleared the way for Rev—preacher, pig farmer, and model of toxic masculinity—to become the main man at the restaurant’s barbecue pit and main squeeze of sexually voracious Tedra.
As in Hamlet, the dead patriarch is engineering revenge from beyond the grave. “I think my uncle had my father killed,” Juicy tells his cousin Tio (Chris Herbie Holland), the play’s Horatio. “Now, my father wants me to kill my uncle.”
Juicy is prone to Hamlet-like introspection; but, rather than debating whether “to be or not to be,” he focuses on self-help. Tio has warned him that familial “cycles of violence are like deep … your Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail, his Pop went to jail and what’s before that? Huh? Slavery.” Ridiculed since childhood as “weird,” “sensitive,” and “soft,” Juicy wants to establish his own brand of masculinity. His longing is summed up by a line of the Radiohead song he sings when his family does karaoke: “I wanna have control.”
Tedra and Rev (Billy Eugene Jones) engage in off-color karaoke during the post-wedding festivities.
In 95 minutes of relentless action, Fat Ham chronicles the backyard barbecue that celebrates the nuptials of Rev and Tedra, the Claudius and Gertrude of the piece. With Pap dead one week, this is a wedding feast where, in Shakespeare’s words, the “funeral baked meats” are “coldly furnish[ing] forth the marriage tables.” The menu features high-caloric excess appropriate for a family obsessed with traditional Black masculinity: “links, ribs, smoked ham, shoulder, a brisket.… “ Tedra cracks wise that Rev “even threw a strawberry shortcake” on the grill.
At the party, Juicy’s family and friends (all harboring secrets) gossip, bicker, and goad one another. Church matron Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas) is a reverse-gender Polonius, bossy and gleefully holier-than-thou. Laertes and Ophelia are present in the guise of Rabby’s children—Larry (Calvin Leon Smith), a Marine suffering PTSD, and tomboy Opal (Adrianna Mitchell).
The siblings, like Juicy, are “just on the edge of figuring something out.” That something has everything to do with sexual identity and, by the time the curtain comes down, each has experienced an epiphany of self-understanding. Juicy’s epiphany leads him to reject the tragic dimensions of his life, but Ijames stops short of examining his protagonist’s insights. Instead, he halts the dialogue abruptly, ending the play with a musical number suitable to the halcyon days of Studio 54. The elliptical stage directions in Ijames’s script say that “the play cracks open into a celebration of the feminine.” Dominique Fawn Hall (costumes), Stacey Derosier (lighting), Maruti Evans (scenic design), and Darrell Grand Moultrie (choreography), among others, assist the playwright in lifting the action out of Tedra and Rev’s backyard, up to drag-show heaven. It’s a crowd-pleasing moment—but afterward, when the houselights come up, it proves a cop-out.
Just before performances of Fat Ham began, Ijames won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. That’s a weighty award that inspires daunting critical expectations. Fat Ham, though, with its eccentric mix of heft and vaudevillian frivolity, defies conventional assumptions. As Opal says to Juicy when he becomes overly serious: “Why you always gotta go deep?”
Fat Ham, a joint production of the Public Theater and National Black Theatre, runs at the Public (425 Lafayette St., Manhattan) through July 17. Evening performances are at 8 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and information, call (212) 967-7555 or visit publictheater.org.
