'Hamlet Is Mine, Too'

James Ijames’s Fat Ham doesn’t just break the fourth wall— it bulldozes it. 

- JASON P. FRANK

Ijames at a table read.

FAT HAM WANTS YOU to talk. It begins abruptly, sans disclaimer, with a character watching OnlyFans on his phone. From that point on, the audience is aware this is not the space for inhibition. The play is a Black queer adaptation of Hamlet by James Ijames, a Philadelphia-based actor turned playwright making his Broadway debut, having won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in spring 2022, three days before Fat Ham debuted at the Public. The show follows our Hamlet, now named Juicy (Marcel Spears), whose father’s ghost, here known as Pap (Billy Eugene Jones), has come back to ask him to kill his uncle, Rev (also Jones), at his mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), and Rev’s wedding party. And the porn watcher is Tio (Chris Herbie Holland), a bolder and brasher (and funnier) Horatio. Its plot beats mirror Hamlet’s, but much of Fat Ham’s tension is built on the homophobia that Rev projects toward Juicy, and the show ends not in total tragedy but with a musical drag performance. What is taken from Shakespeare instead is a disavowal of the fourth wall in hopes of creating a responsive, unrestrained audience. “I think, How many things can I throw in their direction?” Ijames says. “It’s not surgical; it’s a sledgehammer.”

In the broadest terms, what is the project of Fat Ham?