Fat Ham: To Be or Not to Be Tragic
Playwright James Ijames turns Hamlet into Fat Ham
BY SUSIE DAY
Picture: Your father’s died
and your mother’s just
married his brother.
Your father’s ghost appears,
tells you that his brother
murdered him, and commands
you to murder your uncle back.
But you don’t. No, you make this
all about you. You claim agency
and your right to DECIDE to do it.
Of course, you can’t decide, which
drives you, then others, mad. So,
instead of one guy, just about everybody
in your crew — including
you — ends up getting whacked.
Moral: Choices suck; you’re TRAGIC.
You’re also Hamlet. In Western
literature, there’s probably no
greater existentialist chump than
Shakespeare’s damned-if-he-be;
damned-if-he-NOT-to-be Hamlet.
Over the centuries, the renowned
Jennifer Kidwell, Kimberly S. Fairbanks, and Brennan S. Malone in “Fat Ham.”
straight-white-male Prince of
Denmark has been played by actors
of various races and genders.
In fact, in early 2020, just before
COVID set in, two Black women,
THE WILMA THEATER
Cush Jumbo (Lucca in “The Good
Wife”) at London’s Young Vic, and
Ruth Negga (Mildred in “Loving”)
at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse,
portrayed the doomed prince, to
FILM
fair amounts of acclaim.
But what if your inability to take
action in the world didn’t automatically
mean that your world must
end? Forget innovative casting;
what if you made this tragedy into
a comedy, where people without
a lot of choices — who’ve already
endured hard times, death, and
crappy plot twists — choose to go
ahead and live?
Thanks to the Wilma Theater
in Philadelphia, “Hamlet”has now
become “Fat Ham,” the fl avorful
story by playwright James Ijames,
of a tough, turbulent Black family
that runs a barbecue restaurant
in the American South. Here, the
only people to die are a couple of
roaring, self-righteous patriarchs
— and that’s no tragedy.
Hamlet himself is now Juicy, the
plump and tender son of Tedra,
➤ FAT HAM, continued on p.31
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