➤ FAT HAM, from p.19
whose husband was killed while
doing time in prison. Juicy, an
asthmatic, self-proclaimed “big ole
sissy,” spends his time pensively
on his laptop, attending a for-profi t
university and hoping for a future
in personnel management.
Rather than the classical fi ve-act
opus, the play, directed by Morgan
Green, takes place pretty much in
real time on the porch and backyard
of Juicy and Tedra’s home. We
open as Juicy and his best friend
Tio (“Horatio” to you English majors)
are decorating the yard to
celebrate his mother’s wedding to
— how did you guess?! — Juicy’s
uncle.
Tio, a pothead who embraces
life through talk therapy, is probably
the show’s most clear-sighted
character. He passes down some
wisdom from his therapist, reminding
Juicy that his father was
in prison — and hisfather before
him, and hisfather before him —
and before that, slavery: “You’re
carrying around your whole family
business, man. Don’t let that
defi ne you.”
Once Juicy is alone, Pap, his
dead father, appears, and reveals
that Rev, Juicy’s preacher-uncle
hired somebody in the joint to stab
him fi ve times with a sharpened
toothbrush. When Juicy seems reluctant
to take revenge, his father
sneers, “You pansy ass puddle of
spit — whose side are you ON?”
“I’m not sure,” Juicy answers. “I
gotta ponder…”
Enter Tedra and Rev, fresh
from getting married. To get the
party rolling, they feel obliged to
tell Juicy that they’ve just squandered
his college tuition money on
their wedding, plus redecorating
the bathroom. Though heartbroken,
Juicy tries to be a good son
by donning a party T-shirt emblazoned
with a crown and, under it,
“Momma’s Boy.”
The strained festivities continue
as Larry, an elegantly attired Navy
offi cer, and his sister Opal, a sullen
bull dyke, show up at the party
with their mother, Rabby, a church
lady who’s forced Opal to put on a
dress. Of course, these characters
were once Laertes, Ophelia, and
their father Polonius in Shakespeare’s
original. And, though a
good deal of the current plot is given
to barbecue, karaoke, and kingconscience
Malone and Brandon J. Pierce.
catching charades that
don’t quite work, a few almost-
Shakespearean lines survive. “The
king, my queen,” Juicy declaims to
his mother, “is dead.”
“You watch too much PBS,” says
Tedra. “You quote that dead-ass
white man one more time…”
Reviews have called “Fat
Ham”hilarious — and there are
laugh-out-loud lines (“What’s
wrong with being weird?” “It ain’t
Christian”). But though the play is
comedic, there’s too much Black
life running through it to stop at
being funny. Besides Pap, Prison
is another spectral presence; the
plastic yard furniture, cheap balloons
and streamers, the disposable
cups and utensils have, after
all, cost Juicy his college tuition.
Rev — totally missing Larry’s
huge crush on his stepson — is
mightily impressed with Larry in
his action-doll uniform. He admonishes
Juicy to be a MAN like
Larry, “with GOALS and hirable
SKILLS!” Although Juicy and Rev
face off a few times, the prospect
that Juicy will avenge his father is
beside the point; the real question
is what the youth will do with their
lives. In fact, each of them — Juicy,
Tio, Opal, Larry — could easily
perform Hamlet’s “to-be-or-not-tobe”
soliloquy.
“Remember Yorick?” asks Tio,
who’s just back from a yard sale
where he bought a pair of sneakers.
Here, Yorick is a not a prop skull,
but a shared memory of an older
kid, held back years in high school,
who died of a drug overdose. They
had to sell his sneakers to pay for
his funeral… The “lost generation”
begins to muse on their ideal career
options: Juicy’s is in Human Resources;
Larry’s in performing. Opal
wants to open a shooting range; Tio
sees his future in “cannabis industry
speculation” — a wise move,
given his later soliloquy in which he
describes receiving an illuminating
blowjob from a cyber-game Gingerbread
Man — “although I prefer
Gingerbread Ladies.”
I’ll forgo revealing more of the
plot. Just don’t expect tragedy, although
at one point, the characters
do wonder if they shouldn’t all
die: “After all, we tragic.” But that’s
not what happens. In a throwaway
line that I would pay somebody
to add to Shakespeare’s original,
somebody sighs: “This is NOT how
I expected this day to go.”
Without iambic platitudes or
sobering facts about poverty and
THE WILMA THEATER
incarceration, “Fat Ham”offers up
some real political wisdom. The
production’s pacing lags a bit, especially
early on, but the play offers
elements of ludicrous enlightenment
that I’ve seen over decades
in queer, Lower-East-Side theater,
notably the beauteous — and stilltrucking
— Spiderwoman Theater,
founded by three Indigenous
American sisters. This reminds me
to mention “Fat Ham’s” fi lm credits,
thanking the Monacan people
on whose land (now Virginia) was
where the fi lm was shot, and acknowledging
“the deep history of
slavery on the land in which we
will work and stand with Black
people in fi erce advocacy for equality
and justice.”
The cast is uniformly fi ne,
though special kudos should go
to the macho stylings of Lindsay
Smiling, who plays both Rev and
Pap, and Kimberly S. Fairbanks’s
brightly nuanced Tedra. Filmed on
location, “Fat Ham”will stream via
the Wilma Theater through May 23
— but keep looking for it. Like that
justice-deprived ghost, it needs to
haunt us.
FAT HAM | The Wilma Theater
| $37 ($34 for seniors) | Streaming
through May 23
GayCityNews.com | May 20 - June 2, 2021 31
/GayCityNews.com
