Fans of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet will find James Ijames’ audacious reimagining, Fat Ham, a hoot. Set in a backyard barbeque, the play starts with a white-suited jive ass (Billy Eugene Jones) arriving in a whirl of sulphurous smoke to tell his son, a juvenile brooder called Juicy (Marquis D. Gibson in the performance I attended), about the wrong that’s been done him at the hands of his brother and wife. Well, we get every spectacle but those damned “incestuous sheets.”
Along the way, as the characters sashay and butt butts celebrating a suspicious marriage onstage at the American Airlines Theater, we even get some soliloquies such as the one that asks, “what is this quintessence of dust?” On the way to revenge, Fat Ham delivers much existential dread in this house in North Carolina, a “liminal space between the past and the present with an aspirational relationship to the future that is contingent to your history living in the South, . . . inside the second decade of the 21st century,” according to a program note. James Ijames is clearly repurposing whatever lay “rotten in the state of Denmark!”
Tweaking Shakespeare, both Juicy and his “love” and childhood pal, Opal (Adrianna Mitchell) are queer; as a sort of Polonius, Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas) and “Gertrude,” now Tedra (Nikki Crawford) are excellent beefing up the female side of the story. But it isn’t until the staid, conservative Larry (Calvin Leon Smith) morphs into a dancing god that the show hits its spectacular stride, becoming an outsized Las Vegas (or Broadway) revue. What a play within a play!
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