To Like or Not to Like Fat Ham?

The question, and the play, still haunts me.

- HELEN SHAW

JAMES IJAMES’S Fat Ham, a comic adaptation of Hamlet, is more about alleviating generational anguish than it is about Shakespeare. The two plays share little in setting, mood, spirit, or language, but each deals with equivocation, as a man examines and extends a moment of doubt. After seeing this Pulitzer Prize–winning show at the Public Theater, I have been lost in my own version of that long indecision, teetering between disappointment and pleasure. To like Fat Ham, or not to like Fat Ham? That is still my question.

For Ijames, all this ambivalence is soaked in the melting lassitude of a summer backyard get-together where the heat is serious. Instead of princely, dithering Hamlet, Ijames gives us cash-strapped, indecisive Juicy (Marcel Spears), whose murdered father, Pap (Billy Eugene Jones), was a barbecue pitmaster, a bad dad, and a capricious killer. Pap’s place at the grill has been taken up by his identical brother, Rev (also Jones), and now we’re at the party celebrating Rev’s wedding to Juicy’s mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), held just days after Pap has gone into his grave. This sounds bleak, but based on Juicy’s mourning outfit—a half-up pair of black overalls, adorably distressed—the situation is played for laughs. Gleaming in a bedazzled white suit, Pap wafts around in ghostly dudgeon, demanding Juicy make things right. He’s not worried that anything bad will happen to the gay son he barely cared for. “Too soft to die young,” says Pap. “You ain’t got it. What it takes. To perish like me.”