NEW YORK — In playwright James Ijames’ eye-popping “Fat Ham,” a malcontent named Juicy, kinda like Hamlet, is chilling in his North Carolina backyard when his recently deceased dad exits the presumptive fires of hell and pops up out of his patio grill.
His message? Put down your books from that correspondence course at University of Phoenix, you lazy kid, and avenge my prison shanking at the hands of my brother. You know, the guy now married to your wild momma and a pit master about to barbecue some ribs right here, maybe even the ones left over from my recent funeral.
Juicy, who has no clue what to do with this information, is dressed like a moody Dane but he’s hardly a carbon copy. Beyond still living at home, at least.
For one thing, Juicy hated his father and has little time for his abusive uncle (both played by Billy Eugene Jones). For another, he rejects this whole tragic-hero thing. Juicy’s also Black, nerdy and queer; his best pals, the Horatio-like cousin Tio (Chris Herbie Holland) and the Ophelia-esque Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) also are outsiders. So is the Laertes-like Larry (Calvin Leon Smith), a United States Marine who harbors a secret.
In fact, Juicy is the latest in a line of gay, nonconformist and self-doubting Black intellectuals now occupying the hero spots in Broadway plays by the likes of Michael R. Jackson, Jeremy O. Harris and Ijames himself, a trio of radical writers who have shot to prominence in the American theater and are ready, willing and able to pull apart a whole lot of once-settled Broadway wisdom. You know, like who should be at the core of a tragedy and what they should do when they arrive there.
Forsooth, Ijames is going after those core Shakespearean assumptions which have echoed down the centuries on the Great White Way. The guy has guts. And a Pulitzer Prize for this very work.
So “Fat Ham” is a left-leaning deconstruction not just of “Hamlet,” but of tragedy itself. That sounds like a recipe for a show that closes Friday and, for sure, there is a vein of love/hatred for atrophied Black pop culture (typically by implication, a vestige of “white supremacy”) that runs through this play, as it does through the work of Jackson, who won the Tony last year for “A Strange Loop.”
Some of that runs up against ageism and a self-protected intellectual elitism on the part of hugely talented young writers still wrestling with the deeper understanding of mortality and familial forgiveness that will come with age.
But there is nothing dour or overly academic about “Fat Ham,” which has been given a blisteringly well-acted production helmed by director Saheem Ali and staged on the wittiest of satirical sets from Maruti Evans.
At no point does this play feel like anything other than a big-fun Broadway show: it’s a smart, fearless and often wildly entertaining 90 minutes, filled with radical ideas and absurdist spectacle. To his credit, Ijames is willing to blow up even his own assertions. You get musical numbers, tableaux, crazy comedic antics and a suite of outsized performances from the likes of the superb Nikki Crawford, making her Broadway debut, like many in this knockout cast. I’d go so far as to say I can’t recall such a well-acted Broadway show with so many first-timers.
But this is Marcel Spears’ show, and his counterintuitive work here is really something: he manages to operate on two levels, satirizing the entire convention of a star actor and yet upholding what it means to anchor a show at the same time.
“Fat Ham” focuses mostly on the early parts of “Hamlet,” and it actually feels like Ijames ran out of time to really do what he wanted with the geopolitical concerns and the parade of bodies in Act 5. And you’ll likely see Larry’s secret coming. But this is still an incredibly sophisticated takeoff and takedown, replete as it is with reinvented soliloquies, laments and violent acts in service of whatever revenge means in this new young world, barbecuing Broadway boomers with hot sauce on top.
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At American Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St., New York; www.fathambroadway.com.
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