Theatre in Review: Fat Ham (American Airlines Theatre)

	Marcel Spears, Billy Eugene Jones. Photo: Joan Marcus

Following its extended run at the Public Theater last summer, Fat Ham comes to Broadway accessorized with the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. An unabashed crowd pleaser packed with plenty of lowdown laughs, it relocates the problems of a certain Danish prince to a North Carolina backyard where mayhem reigns. Spiking the action with melodramatic flourishes and culminating in a disco-tastic finale, it easily wins over the audience with its popular sentiments and button-pushing ways. You'll laugh, but whether you'll leave the theatre satisfied is less easy to predict.

Juicy, the play's Hamlet figure, is the alienated scion of a Black clan known for its barbecue restaurant, a choice apparently made so playwright James Ijames can pull a fast one with the line "Aye, there's the rub." Juicy's father, Pap, in prison for a pointless, casual murder ("Got blood all over the pulled pork," notes Tedra, Juicy's wayward mother), has been fatally knifed by another inmate. After an indecently brief period of mourning, Tedra is marrying Rev, Pap's brother, never mind the memorial floral wreath still sitting on the backyard deck. As Juicy's cousin Tio remarks in a typical moment of unchecked candor, "Your daddy ain't been dead a week and [Rev] already Stanley Steamering your mom." Enter the unquiet spirit of Pap, covered with a checkered tablecloth -- "I was trying to look more like a ghost," he says -- commanding Juicy to wreak revenge on Rev, who ordered the hit on his own brother.

Ijames rings all sorts of changes on the plot of Hamlet. Juicy is queer, as is Opal, the play's sort-of Ophelia. (Among the characters, Juicy and Opal are not alone in their sexual orientation.) Pap and Rev are practiced abusers who enjoy tormenting Juicy, both emotionally and physically. Tedra (whose morals are remarkably elastic) and Rev have spent Juicy's college tuition money on home renovations. ("I need a bathroom fit for a king, baby!" Rev insists.) Shakespeare's conscience-trapping play The Murder of Gonzago becomes an all-too-revealing game of charades. Occasionally, the original text pokes through: "The king, my queen, is dead," murmurs Juicy in a melancholy moment. "You watch too much PBS," replies an irritated Tedra. "How can one watch too much PBS?" he wonders.

Fat Ham has plenty of fun with any number of plot points, beginning with Juicy's online studies at the University of Phoenix. (His planned career in human resources is cause for universal snickering.) Opal dreams of opening a "shooting range-themed buffet restaurant," an enterprise that, she says, will harvest "Zuckerberg money." Rabby, Opal's raucous church-lady mother, blithely ignoring Juicy's "soft" manner, says "He was a little playboy when he was little." Juicy, bemused, asks, "Don't you think it's a little weird to refer to a child as a playboy?" Some of the biggest laughs come from Saheem Ali's direction: "You know I like girls, right?" inquires Opal of Juicy. The long, up-and-down look he gives her says it all.

As you can tell, Ijames has cooked up a multicourse buffet of dysfunctions, including homicide, bullying, and homosexual panic. At the same time, the playwright is determined to wash his hands of tragedy; as Tio, the play's Horatio figure, notes, "You begin to consider what your life would be like if you chose pleasure over harm." Fair enough, but Fat Ham doesn't earn its good times; instead, the heavy authorial hand is felt throughout. The characters frequently step out of the action to address us, laying out the play's themes. Indeed, they are constantly aware of the audience, often turning to us for validation. ("They...they think I'm trashy, don't they?" complains Tedra, pointing to us. "'Cause I married my late husband's brother.") And, just when death strikes yet again and it appears as if we might be barreling toward a corpse-strewn finale, tragedy is pre-empted by a flashy display of fabulousness that resolves nothing.

It's understandable that Ijames -- author of the electrifying Kill Move Paradise, about the slaughter of young Black men -- wants to spin a scenario with some joy in it; this is also true of Lynn Nottage, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu, and Keenan Scott II in their recent works. But Ijames takes the easy route here, spending ninety minutes minting outrageous gags at the characters' expense before pronouncing a happy ending by authorial fiat. Fat Ham is fun in a shallow, sketch-comedy way, but the playwright is, for once, too hooked on pleasing the audience. Pandering in a good cause is still pandering.

The best reason to see Fat Ham is the cast of talented new faces plus the fast-rising Billy Eugene Jones, who delivers a pair of chilling authority figures as Pap and Rev. Nikki Crawford's untethered Tedra hilariously appraises Juicy's sexual attractions before giving a karaoke performance worthy of a gentleman's club. Adrianna Mitchell and Benja Kay Thomas make an amusingly bickering mother-and-daughter pair as Opal and Rabby. Calvin Leon Smith simmers effectively as Rabby's son, a Marine whose soldierly manner conceals a big secret. (That his character makes no sense isn't the actor's fault.) As Tio, Juicy's stoner cousin, Chris Herbie Holland effortlessly handles his thoroughly baked monologue about sex, drugs, and gingerbread men, casting him as the play's cracked voice of reason. As Juicy, Marcel Spears has grown enormously in the role, greeting his out-of-control relatives with a series of priceless deadpan looks and effortlessly slipping in and out of iambic pentameter.

Maruti Evans' naturalistic backyard set works well as a staging area for these semi-supernatural family intrigues -- wait for the moment when Pap pops out of the smoker -- and it also executes a genuinely startling transformation for the finale. Lighting designer Bradley King earns his presence on the creative team with a series of spooky cues; an eerie, horror-movie red wash; and an array of chases and colors during Juicy's karaoke aria and in that over-the-top finale. Dominique Fawn Hill's costumes, especially Tedra's flamboyant wardrobe, are intricately detailed and unfailingly right for each character. Mikaal Sulaiman's solid sound design effectively turns the America Airlines Theatre into a dance palace when needed.

Fat Ham's emphasis on affirmation at the expense of tragedy -- in effect, its intention to rewrite the too-prevalent cultural narratives that cast Black people as victims -- is probably urgently needed; at the performance I attended, the audience received it hungrily. Still, Ijames is talented enough to work out his characters' dilemmas honestly without resorting to that cop-out ending. That Pulitzer, I fear, sends the wrong message. Fat Ham simply doesn't cut as deeply as, say, A Strange Loop, the previous winner, which tackles similar themes. Ijames' skills as an entertainer have been amply rewarded with a lengthy run last summer and a Broadway transfer; whether they deserve a major award is another thing entirely. --David Barbour