Fat Ham
Awards
- Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Drama 2022
Description
Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, James Ijames' Fat Ham reinvents Shakespeare's masterpiece in startling and hilarious ways amidst the backdrop of a family barbecue in the American South.
Juicy—a young, queer, Southern man, who is grappling with questions of identity—is visited by the ghost of his father (Pap) at his mother’s wedding/family barbeque. Pap demands that Juicy avenge his recent murder. How will Juicy, a sensitive and self-aware young Black man, trying to break a cycle of trauma and toxic masculinity, avenge his father’s premature death? Fat Ham reinvents Shakespeare’s masterpiece in startling and hilarious ways amidst the backdrop of a family barbeque in the American South.
Reviews
“Hamlet said it first: ‘What a piece of work.’”
- Helen Shaw, Vulture
“A broad, buoyant comedy . . . James Ijames’s riff on Hamlet is an unalloyed comedy pleasure.”
- Charles Isherwood, Wall Street Journal
“Unabashedly entertaining . . . We need plays like Fat Ham.”
- Peter Marks, Washington Post
“James Ijames’s outstanding transformation of Shakespeare’s tragedy into a play about Black masculinity and queerness, both echoes Hamlet and finds a language beyond it . . . the effect is stunning, making the play a living text, moving between Hamlet, the story happening on the stage, and the world beyond the fourth wall.”
- Maya Phillips, The New York Times
“A fresh and vital force.”
- Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker