Fat Ham by James Ijames, and: White Girl in Danger by Michael R. Jackson (review)

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• Fat Ham by James Ijames, and: White Girl in Danger by Michael R. Jackson
• Kevin Byrne

FAT HAM. By James Ijames. Directed by Saheem Ali. American Airlines Theatre, New York. May 13, 2023. WHITE GIRL IN DANGER. Book, music, and lyrics by Michael R. Jackson. Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Vineyard Theatre, New York. May 13, 2023.

The overlapping New York runs of James Ijames’s Fat Ham and Michael R. Jackson’s White Girl in Danger brought to the fore some remarkable connections between the two acclaimed productions, which I had the good fortune to see on the same day. Each created dense theatrical landscapes through the appropriation of other texts and genres, using them to complicate and underline the stories they told. Fat Ham is modeled after Hamlet, and White Girl in Danger draws from daytime soap operas in its overall aesthetics and reliance on pastel. Shakespeare and the soaps are full of white stories and white problems, which makes it all the more intriguing when Black artists use them as fodder to tell their own tales. Both have enough cultural currency that their various signifier—skulls for the former, mysterious bruises for the latter—can be easily identified and lovingly remixed.

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Marcel Spears (Juicy) and Billy Eugene Jones (Pap) in Fat Ham. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The production history of Fat Ham, from debuting as a streaming production during the pandemic to winning the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, made its arrival on Broadway even more joyous. The plot of the play unfolds in real time over the course of a particularly fraught wedding celebration. The central character is Juicy, whose mother has recently married his uncle after the sudden, violent death of his father. The setting is the backyard of the family home, and the play begins as Juicy organizes decorations for the party. In Saheem Ali’s production at the American Airlines Theatre, the helium balloons that bobbed around the stage indicated the [End Page 93] haste with which the party and the wedding were planned. In a lovely touch, they were festooned, bizarrely, with messages for birthdays, holidays, and get-well-soons. The upstage center of the backyard set was dominated by a large grill that ominously leaked smoke.

Click for larger view
View full resolution

The ensemble of Fat Ham. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The show quickly set up the analogues with Hamlet, largely in terms of plot, character, and motivation, which then deepened and strained as the performance went on. Take, for example, the arrival of the father’s ghost, who demanded that Juicy exact revenge on the uncle for orchestrating his assassination. Murder the murderer—so far, so Shakespeare. But in their ensuing conversation, as Juicy expressed some hesitation over the act, the ghost snapped and lunged at him. Juicy’s defensive crouch encapsulated a well of trauma that word-lessly summed up the abusive dynamic between them and further complicated the need for paternal approval that is the supposed driving force of any Hamlet’s desire for revenge.

All the characters were richly drawn, sutured to a foil from the source text but with additional psychological complexities. The whole play is steeped in sex and sexuality, desire and touch. Juicy is gay, though fumbling and quiet about it. All the other family members know it without fully being able to mention or accept it, as denoted by the repeated, derisive characterization of Juicy as “soft.” This made Laertes stand-in Larry’s expression of his desire for Juicy midway through the show all the more surprising.

Fat Ham balanced its fidelity to the source text with an invitation to the audience to notice the parallels. I was particularly struck by the ways in which Ijames, who is queer and Black, takes the default whiteness of Shakespeare’s text and adds new specificit . The connections ranged from small to large, and were peppered throughout; early on, Juicy made an “ay, there’s the rub” joke about spices. When Larry arrived for the celebratory barbecue in his military dress uniform, the audience likely suspected that their interaction would lead to violence, as it does in...