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Fat Ham
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright James Ijames reinvents Shakespeare's masterpiece with his new drama, a delectable comic tragedy. Juicy is a queer, Southern college kid, already grappling with some serious questions of identity, when the ghost of his father shows up in their backyard, demanding that Juicy avenge his murder. It feels like a familiar story to Juicy, well-versed in Hamlet's woes. What's different is Juicy himself, a sensitive and selfaware young Black man trying to break the cycles of trauma and violence in service of his own liberation. From an uproarious family barbecue emerges a compelling examination of love and loss, pain and joy.
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2023
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1167 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 271 reviews
March 19, 2025
A Thicc Hamlet
A review of the Theater Communications Group paperback (2023).
I recently saw a Toronto production of Fat Ham and, as per usual, I wanted to read the playscript to see how much the stage diverged from the page. Really there wasn't that much difference. This is an often silly and over the top piece, but which still loosely adheres to its original inspiration while at the same time using it as a vehicle for coming out queer and for every human's need for self-expression. For those familiar with the original, much of the fun comes from spotting the easter eggs besides the obvious character parallels.
The only major changes I noticed was in the karaoke 🎤 scenes. The mother Tedra (the Queen Gertrude character) sings Crystal Waters' 100% Pure Love in the script. On stage we saw a performance of Taylor Dane's Tell It To My Heart which included the lyrics projected as surtitles over the stage, inviting the audience to sing along. Sadly most of us didn't know it well enough to risk it 😅.
That was followed by Juicy (the Hamlet character) singing Radiohead's Creep which IS in the script. But added in the stage version Opal (the Ophelia character) does a head-banging, whip-your-hair fan freakout while Juicy sings, including a cartwheel 🤸🏻♀️. The audience was roaring along to that 🤣.
Promotional poster for the recent Canadian Stage production of "Fat Ham". Image sourced from Canadian Stage.
The scene setting is changed to a Black American family's backyard barbecue in the Southern U.S. instead of a castle in Denmark. The celebration is for Tedra and Rev's (the King Claudius character portrayed by an actor who also doubles as the Ghost character) wedding. Juicy's friend Tio (the Horatio character) provides comic relief. Church lady Rabby (the Polonius character) attends the party along with her children Opal and Larry (the Laertes character). And no, the ending is not as tragic as the original.
This might read as a 3-star on the page, but knowing and seeing its potential brought alive on stage I have no hesitation in calling it a 4-star.
The cast of the Toronto production of "Fat Ham" at curtain call. Image sourced from own photo.
Soundtrack
On YouTube listen to and watch the videos of Crystal Waters' 100% Pure Love here, Taylor Dane's Tell It To My Heart here and Radiohead's Creep here.
A review of the Theater Communications Group paperback (2023).
GERTRUDE: He’s fat, and scant of breath. - Queen Gertrude comments on her son Hamlet in William Shakespeare's Hamlet Act V Scene 2.
I recently saw a Toronto production of Fat Ham and, as per usual, I wanted to read the playscript to see how much the stage diverged from the page. Really there wasn't that much difference. This is an often silly and over the top piece, but which still loosely adheres to its original inspiration while at the same time using it as a vehicle for coming out queer and for every human's need for self-expression. For those familiar with the original, much of the fun comes from spotting the easter eggs besides the obvious character parallels.
The only major changes I noticed was in the karaoke 🎤 scenes. The mother Tedra (the Queen Gertrude character) sings Crystal Waters' 100% Pure Love in the script. On stage we saw a performance of Taylor Dane's Tell It To My Heart which included the lyrics projected as surtitles over the stage, inviting the audience to sing along. Sadly most of us didn't know it well enough to risk it 😅.
That was followed by Juicy (the Hamlet character) singing Radiohead's Creep which IS in the script. But added in the stage version Opal (the Ophelia character) does a head-banging, whip-your-hair fan freakout while Juicy sings, including a cartwheel 🤸🏻♀️. The audience was roaring along to that 🤣.
Promotional poster for the recent Canadian Stage production of "Fat Ham". Image sourced from Canadian Stage.
The scene setting is changed to a Black American family's backyard barbecue in the Southern U.S. instead of a castle in Denmark. The celebration is for Tedra and Rev's (the King Claudius character portrayed by an actor who also doubles as the Ghost character) wedding. Juicy's friend Tio (the Horatio character) provides comic relief. Church lady Rabby (the Polonius character) attends the party along with her children Opal and Larry (the Laertes character). And no, the ending is not as tragic as the original.
This might read as a 3-star on the page, but knowing and seeing its potential brought alive on stage I have no hesitation in calling it a 4-star.
The cast of the Toronto production of "Fat Ham" at curtain call. Image sourced from own photo.
Soundtrack
On YouTube listen to and watch the videos of Crystal Waters' 100% Pure Love here, Taylor Dane's Tell It To My Heart here and Radiohead's Creep here.
October 5, 2023
It's an audacious premise, and there are a few clever and funny lines, but it seems very lightweight for a Pulitzer Prize winner - not that they all have to be turgid dramas, but this seemed kind of one-note - but perhaps it plays much better than it reads. The humor is very broad, but isn't all that witty.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/12/fat-ham...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/th...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/th...
https://ew.com/theater/theater-review...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/202...
https://nypost.com/2023/04/12/fat-ham...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/th...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/th...
https://ew.com/theater/theater-review...
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/202...
November 30, 2024
A shockingly good fantasia on Shakespeare's Hamlet, seen through the lens of "queer Black joy". The Seattle production in May of '24 was outstanding, and reading the script has brought it all back so vividly. I'm even more impressed now that it's clear where that production journeyed beyond the printed page. Every interpretive flight of fancy was genius.
4.5 stars
4.5 stars
January 8, 2023
This script is a black queer reimagining of Shakespeare's Hamlet, where instead of the royal court of Denmark, it's set in an NC BBQ joint.
If I could pick something higher than five stars, I would. I already have a dream-team in my mind--cast members, directors, costume designers...not that I make those decisions at the theater where I work. I love that this is a North Carolina script, that it's an NC BBQ setting, that it creates a space for this black family to wrestle with Shakespeare and ultimately to blow up cishet white patriarchy.
Such good roles for the actors! Such epic themes and important dramatic actions! Such exciting technical elements in the script like when Rev brings in a pig carcass and throws it in the smoker.
Shakespeare is fine but a play set among the history and culture of BBQ is exciting for anyone who grew up in a place that has Strong Feelings about sauces and meats and how BBQ happens.
This script has made my bucket list of shows I want to work on someday.
If I could pick something higher than five stars, I would. I already have a dream-team in my mind--cast members, directors, costume designers...not that I make those decisions at the theater where I work. I love that this is a North Carolina script, that it's an NC BBQ setting, that it creates a space for this black family to wrestle with Shakespeare and ultimately to blow up cishet white patriarchy.
Such good roles for the actors! Such epic themes and important dramatic actions! Such exciting technical elements in the script like when Rev brings in a pig carcass and throws it in the smoker.
Shakespeare is fine but a play set among the history and culture of BBQ is exciting for anyone who grew up in a place that has Strong Feelings about sauces and meats and how BBQ happens.
This script has made my bucket list of shows I want to work on someday.
October 10, 2024
A camp, queer, black, bathetic retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The title, Fat Ham, obviously alludes to its literary progenitor, Hamlet, but it also more subtly points to the biblical myth of Ham—Noah cursing Canaan, the son of Ham, for seeing his father naked (a story that was later reinterpreted as an etiology for black skin and a justification for the enslavement of Africans). In this drama, Hamlet is recast as Juicy, not a prince, not a scholastic at the esteemed university of Wittenberg, but a lonely gay adolescent enrolled in an online course in human resources at the University of Phoenix. Horatio becomes Tio, a porn-addicted dope-head who fantasizes about gingerbread men. Ophelia is Opal, a sassy lesbian who knowingly points out Juicy's weird antics; her brother, Larry, is a closeted Marine (perhaps not unlike his literary antecedent Laertes, the belligerent princeling who went off to France to study and perhaps carouse in a more libertine country). And finally King Claudius is reincarnated as Rev, the new manager of the family-run barbecue restaurant who spends his day roasting and brazing—another pun on the play's title— ham. Rev had only recently arranged the death of Juicy's father (by hiring henchman to shiv him in a prison shower) and has just married Juicy's mother, Tedra. They've spent up Juicy's tuition on bathroom renovations.
It's a hilarious spoofing of Shakespeare. Juicy behaves just like Hamlet as the myopic metaphysician, more interested in dialectics than realpolitik. When confronted with the ghost of his father, he says, "Well if I'm seeing you I can conjecture that you are a ghost by virtue of the fact that I watched you get buried". But Juicy's soliloquies also turn Hamlet's melodrama into a contemporary vernacular pathos. When recounting his father's crimes, he says coldly, "Slit Boogie's throat so deep his head came off. He had to lean into the knife. This is what I was raised in. Pig guts and bad choices. Far fetched?" Like Hamlet, Juicy knows that he is acting a part in an overblown drama; he knows the conventions of the baroque genre he has been thrust into; he knows his circumstances are farfetched but he follows through nonetheless. Mimicking Hamlet's own descent into madness, Juicy even begins to quote Hamlet's own words in a deranged monologic remix (quoting Hamlet's famous lines about how he plans to "catch the conscience of the king" and then later his words to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "What is this quintessence of dust?") Citing Hamlet in Shakespearian English, Juicy seems even more manic than Hamlet ever was ("you look crazy out here quoting Shakespeare and shit," his mother says.)
But whereas Hamlet ends in internecine carnage, where the cast are either stabbed or poisoned to death, Fat Ham offers its characters hope and catharsis. After Rev chokes on a bone and dies refusing help from his queer step-son, the other characters decide they want to live. Breaking the fourth wall, the characters look out toward the audience and question the dramatic need for death at all. In the end, Larry doesn't die like Laertes did in an ill-advised jousting match. Larry does get in a skirmish with Juicy breaking his nose, but his last stage appearance isn't a violent death but a bright-lit drag performance. The characters escape the role-play conventions of masculinity and femininity that have been scripted for them and they are liberated from the tragic denouement of their plot. The future is queer for Hamlet, and Juicy doesn't have to recapitulate a cycle of intergenerational suffering.
It's a hilarious spoofing of Shakespeare. Juicy behaves just like Hamlet as the myopic metaphysician, more interested in dialectics than realpolitik. When confronted with the ghost of his father, he says, "Well if I'm seeing you I can conjecture that you are a ghost by virtue of the fact that I watched you get buried". But Juicy's soliloquies also turn Hamlet's melodrama into a contemporary vernacular pathos. When recounting his father's crimes, he says coldly, "Slit Boogie's throat so deep his head came off. He had to lean into the knife. This is what I was raised in. Pig guts and bad choices. Far fetched?" Like Hamlet, Juicy knows that he is acting a part in an overblown drama; he knows the conventions of the baroque genre he has been thrust into; he knows his circumstances are farfetched but he follows through nonetheless. Mimicking Hamlet's own descent into madness, Juicy even begins to quote Hamlet's own words in a deranged monologic remix (quoting Hamlet's famous lines about how he plans to "catch the conscience of the king" and then later his words to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "What is this quintessence of dust?") Citing Hamlet in Shakespearian English, Juicy seems even more manic than Hamlet ever was ("you look crazy out here quoting Shakespeare and shit," his mother says.)
But whereas Hamlet ends in internecine carnage, where the cast are either stabbed or poisoned to death, Fat Ham offers its characters hope and catharsis. After Rev chokes on a bone and dies refusing help from his queer step-son, the other characters decide they want to live. Breaking the fourth wall, the characters look out toward the audience and question the dramatic need for death at all. In the end, Larry doesn't die like Laertes did in an ill-advised jousting match. Larry does get in a skirmish with Juicy breaking his nose, but his last stage appearance isn't a violent death but a bright-lit drag performance. The characters escape the role-play conventions of masculinity and femininity that have been scripted for them and they are liberated from the tragic denouement of their plot. The future is queer for Hamlet, and Juicy doesn't have to recapitulate a cycle of intergenerational suffering.
January 8, 2026
saw this in 2023 and it was literally prob the best performance i have ever seen in MY LIFE NOT BEING DRAMATIC. it was so fun to read this after seeing the show all these years later!!!!
November 30, 2024
JUICY
Why the sheet?
PAP
I was trying to look more like a ghost.
JUICY
You're dead.
PAP
So.
JUICY
Well if I'm seeing you I can conjecture that you are a ghost by virtue of the fact that I watched you get buried. Hence... no need for you, the newly deceased, to dress up as a ghost.
juicy is such a clever and hysterical rendition of hamlet and this play has some of the best gertrude + laertes takes i've ever seen in a hamlet retelling. also butch ophelia. i need to see this live it would change me irrevocably
Why the sheet?
PAP
I was trying to look more like a ghost.
JUICY
You're dead.
PAP
So.
JUICY
Well if I'm seeing you I can conjecture that you are a ghost by virtue of the fact that I watched you get buried. Hence... no need for you, the newly deceased, to dress up as a ghost.
juicy is such a clever and hysterical rendition of hamlet and this play has some of the best gertrude + laertes takes i've ever seen in a hamlet retelling. also butch ophelia. i need to see this live it would change me irrevocably
August 17, 2023
i would pay money to work on this show
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June 4, 2024I read this almost immediately after reading Hamlet, so the tragedy was fresh on my mind. Fat Ham certainly derives plot points and occasional dialogue from Shakespeare's play, but it is its own thing. Or at least it is close to its own thing. It is almost a foil to Hamlet. I don't know if the play could stand on its own without an audience member having at least a cursory knowledge of Hamlet, maybe it could.
Where Hamlet is tragic, brooding, and definitely long, Fat Ham is spontaneous, funny, and couldn't possibly take more than 90 minutes to perform. I say Fat Ham funny, but don't allow that word to trivialize the play. It is most certainly serious, a critique of Hamlet. Hamlet is set against a backdrop of warring European states and complex geopolitical politics, and Fat Ham takes place in a single afternoon in a backyard barbecue. Prince Hamlet descends into a solitary madness, whereas Juicy (Fat Ham's protagonist) seems to be surrounded by madness in everyone else. Where Hamlet is a conquest of the masculine, Fat Ham is a celebration of the feminine. Fat Ham is soft and Hamlet is hard, and so on.
Fat Ham wants to be a lot of things. It's a meditation on trauma, sexuality, race, history, violence, and the theater. For the most part, the play succeeds. I can't help but feel, however, after reading it, that Fat Ham is ultimately superficial. It lacks the depth and scope of Hamlet, but maybe that's partly the point. Things don't have to be epic and international to be important.
I haven't seen Fat Ham live, and I will probably never have the opportunity to see it, but I would watch it if I had the chance. Reading the play was a great way to spend an evening. It gives me a lot to think about. I didn't agree with it all (and I hated the ending--actually, I loved the ending until the very last page, but then again my masculinity leans towards the toxic end), but I appreciated the way Ijames writes and I had fun reading .
Where Hamlet is tragic, brooding, and definitely long, Fat Ham is spontaneous, funny, and couldn't possibly take more than 90 minutes to perform. I say Fat Ham funny, but don't allow that word to trivialize the play. It is most certainly serious, a critique of Hamlet. Hamlet is set against a backdrop of warring European states and complex geopolitical politics, and Fat Ham takes place in a single afternoon in a backyard barbecue. Prince Hamlet descends into a solitary madness, whereas Juicy (Fat Ham's protagonist) seems to be surrounded by madness in everyone else. Where Hamlet is a conquest of the masculine, Fat Ham is a celebration of the feminine. Fat Ham is soft and Hamlet is hard, and so on.
Fat Ham wants to be a lot of things. It's a meditation on trauma, sexuality, race, history, violence, and the theater. For the most part, the play succeeds. I can't help but feel, however, after reading it, that Fat Ham is ultimately superficial. It lacks the depth and scope of Hamlet, but maybe that's partly the point. Things don't have to be epic and international to be important.
I haven't seen Fat Ham live, and I will probably never have the opportunity to see it, but I would watch it if I had the chance. Reading the play was a great way to spend an evening. It gives me a lot to think about. I didn't agree with it all (and I hated the ending--actually, I loved the ending until the very last page, but then again my masculinity leans towards the toxic end), but I appreciated the way Ijames writes and I had fun reading .
July 3, 2023
if i could give this six stars i would, love this, love u james, so happy i got to see it on stage too! this is just everything my black, nerdy, gay, shakespeare & comedy obsessed self needed 🤎 personally requesting more Willy remixes 😌 lets seeee, how about a Thirteenth Night? The Triumph of Love’s Hard Work? A Very Tragic Story with No Mistakes? jk haha anyways will probably reread a bajillion times before we do it at school…crossing my fingers that i get to play opal 😄😄😄😄😄😄😄
October 4, 2023
SUCH a good play
December 24, 2023
Listened to this one on Audible. Loved it.
April 7, 2024
This is one of those plays that while you read them you just feel like want to work on a production of it. Anyone else ever get that feeling?
October 29, 2024
this is how modern shakespeare adaptions need to be done
December 19, 2023
It was divine intervention that I came across the play Fat Ham. An old friend was in town with her son and wanted to see Broadway shows. She is a theatre professor and he loves theatre. A twist on Hamlet that featured a queer Southern Hamlet seemed like the perfect choice. The performance was cathartic - we laughed, cried, grieved and sang. I know it was written before the pandemic but the play felt acted as a vehicle to process the pandemic and all we went through. I then read the play. It is so smart.
July 14, 2024
La verdad me sorprendió mucho Fat Ham, no sé si para bien o para mal. Creo que me esperaba otra cosa y que el impacto hubiera sido mucho más positivo viendo una puesta en escena de la obra mas que leyendo el libreto.
Rescato algunas cosas pero siento que es esa clase de obras que te gustan más las actuaciones y el contexto donde están pasando las cosas que el texto en si.
Me divierten las diferencias de Juicy con Hamlet; específicamente sentir que Hamlet tiene un mundo interior muy caótico y en la historia de Juicy el caos está en el mundo que lo rodea. Me pareció una propuesta interesante.
Rescato algunas cosas pero siento que es esa clase de obras que te gustan más las actuaciones y el contexto donde están pasando las cosas que el texto en si.
Me divierten las diferencias de Juicy con Hamlet; específicamente sentir que Hamlet tiene un mundo interior muy caótico y en la historia de Juicy el caos está en el mundo que lo rodea. Me pareció una propuesta interesante.
October 29, 2024
I loved it!
November 20, 2024
Some good funny lines but not my vibe. Wished for more character development.
December 7, 2025
Everyone who knows me knows I love hamlet. I love plays based on hamlet maybe even more. So this was a very fun read for me. Ijames has a real gift for writing dialogue. The characters — especially Juicy and Tedra — have palpable depth. But I’m not sure how to feel about the ending. It was anticlimactic and also confusing. Also, you can’t just say in the stage directions that something feels sublime. Like what does that mean.
February 17, 2025
Fat Ham is a retelling of Hamlet where the family is a contemporary African-American family; Hamlet (Juicy), Laertes (Larry), and Ophelia (Opal) are gay; and the setting is a bbq joint in the South instead of the court of Denmark.
The play is laugh out loud funny at points. I chuckled to myself as Juicy sang karaoke to Radiohead’s “Creep” and the Claudius figure (Uncle Rev) thought that he was insane for loving this “funeral music.” I also laughed when, at the end, the cast breaks the fourth and realizes they’re all supposed to die, if this is truly a retelling of Hamlet.
Well executed, meaningful, and enjoyable.
The play is laugh out loud funny at points. I chuckled to myself as Juicy sang karaoke to Radiohead’s “Creep” and the Claudius figure (Uncle Rev) thought that he was insane for loving this “funeral music.” I also laughed when, at the end, the cast breaks the fourth and realizes they’re all supposed to die, if this is truly a retelling of Hamlet.
Well executed, meaningful, and enjoyable.
June 5, 2024
I’ve always had difficulty with old English stories, I get stuck on the language, the syntax of Shakespeare trips me up. This I could understand and enjoy! Tragic and relatable, daddy issues, I’m here for it.
October 15, 2024
Both a hilarious and earnest adaptation of Hamlet set in a NC backyard barbecue, Fat Ham is so entertaining! Characters are strong revisions of the familiar ones, some closer to the source than others. The central themes of cycles of violence and fate vs. free will are incredibly developed through Black cultural history. Loved this.
March 29, 2024
love love love
March 30, 2024
the idea that the feminine saves hamlet is crushing me, it’s SO GOOD
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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April 18, 2024“You decide that gingerbread man blow jobs are definitely gonna be a big part of your new world.”
May 30, 2024
One of the best things I’ve read in a really long time.
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June 7, 2024Black queer reimagining of Hamlet. Darkly funny. Delightful.
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August 5, 2024I regret not springing for tickets when it was at the Public but at least I could spend a nice 40 minutes reading the script
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January 27, 2025smart and hilarious. loved how ijames twisted Hamlet’s themes of sexuality and (for lack of better words) daddy issues into modern day.
June 8, 2025
Great adaptation of Hamlet. Loved some parts more than others, but as a whole, really excellent.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 271 reviews