VOICES AS TOLD TO The PLAY'S the THING

Shakespeare's HAMLET has been endlessly ADAPTED. Playwright JAMES IJAMES'S FAT HAM turns the chilling TRAGEDY into a RIOTOUS exploration of QUEERNESS.

In May of this year, James Ijames won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Fat Ham, a bawdy, Black, funny, and unabashedly queer adaptation (of sorts) of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Set on a North Carolina pig farm, the play closely follows the beats of the famous tragedy but remixes them into a meditation on masculinity, sexuality, mourning, and joy. Juicy, the play's protagonist and Hamlet stand-in, is a fat Black queer boy who has just seen the ghost of his father, Pap. Pap has returned to earth for revenge: He claims that his brother, Juicy's uncle Rev, murdered him in order to marry his wife, Tedra, and visits Juicy on the afternoon of a cookout celebrating their union to demand Juicy kill Rev. Early in the play, Juicy turns to the audience and soliloquies, "Fathers and sons. That shit can get dark. / You know. / When the chemistry ain't right. When the father / Is too heavy and the son is too light. / When the father thinks the son is too light / When the son is too heavy. /That fucks shit up." It's a virtuoso moment that announces Ijames as not only a major talent but also, rarest of things, a writer who surprises his audience.

Here, he tells Harper's Bazaar about Fat Ham and the play's conversations around queerness and hauntings, the nature of heaven, and humor as a gateway to the audience in theater.

GROWING UP, THERE WAS A RIGIDITY that I associated with masculinity that I never really fit into. And Hamlet has always been a character that I read as being soft, porous. To me, softness is also about being penetrable. For people who move through the world that way, they're always catching those "slings and arrows," to use Shakespeare's language. But I think the gift is if you can experience those things, they remind you to be softer, to be even more porous. That's what Juicy, the main character, finds for himself over the course of the play.