Fat Ham
Hamlet Reimagined as a Contemporary Comic Drama
By: Victor Cordell - Mar 29, 2025
What the theatrical world has desperately needed is a reimagining of Hamlet, but set in contemporary time in the American south and with an overweight, gay, black title character. Oh, and it should be a comedy. Well, maybe a rethinking really wasn’t so necessary, but not only was playwright James Ijames undeterred, but his adaptation of William Shakespeare’s and perhaps the world’s greatest literary tragedy, won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and five Tony nominations for the play’s Broadway run. Touché.
While Fat Ham has received many decorations, that doesn’t make a production an automatic slam-dunk success. It requires solid direction to ensure crack timing of the humor and great actors to deliver the lines. Happily, the San Francisco Playhouse production with Margo Hall at the directorial helm and a cast of outstanding actors deliver the goods with relish. The fine set by Nina Ball and crack lighting by Stephanie Johnson don’t hurt either.
Fat Ham is distinguished as much by its differences than its similarities to its inspiration. Rather than a royal family with the gravity of succession weighing in on the plot, the murdered Pap (i.e., the ghost of King Hamlet) was a purveyor of barbeque and a pig farmer. The formalities of the original are abandoned for modern vernacular. The characters correspond, but Prince Hamlet becomes Juicy, a thicc, “soft,” sensitive young man, melancholy and reflective.
A couple of soliloquies are delivered directly from the script of Hamlet, and Devin A. Cunningham, who soars while inducing empathy for Juicy, delivers them with aplomb. One of particular note begins "I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play have .....," which foretells a trap that Juicy will later set for Rev. Also, there are a couple of wink-wink references to the original. An energized Jordan Covington is super-sexed while being pretty explicitly off-color and hyper humorous as Juicy’s cousin Tio (echoing Horatio), who notes that at the end of Hamlet he survives surrounded by the carnage of the other leading characters. Is that repeated in Fat Ham? I’ll never tell.
The mousy Juicy’s dilemma derives from visits by the ghost of Pap who demands that he exact revenge by murdering Pap’s brother, Rev (King Claudius), who had killed him. Ron Chapman grimly seethes with immorality and Machiavellianism playing both brothers. But Juicy rejects violence at a personal level and for its hobbling of black society. What’s more, while he loathes Rev, he didn’t exactly love Pap, asking his ghost “Why were you so mean to me when you were alive?” Yet, he doesn’t outright reject the idea of revenge.
The issue that both Pap and Rev have with Juicy is that he postures effeminately, lacking manly demeanor. A strong thread of sexual identity runs throughout the play, and indeed, Opal is a closeted lesbian. This is the Ophelia role played deftly by Courtney Gabrielle Williams as the spunky but respectful daughter who wears a dress that she hates to placate her mother, Rabby, who in a gender shift represents Polonius. Phaedra Tillery-Boughton plays Rabby as the stereotypical Black church-going lady becrowned with a fashionable hat and dressed to the nines. She is a walking laugh machine with her high-pitched rapid patter and flippantly dismissive mien.
Although most of the personalities reveal themselves quickly, perhaps the greatest transformation that the playwright creates is in the person of Larry, who has little stage time. Samuel Ademola effectively plays the analogue to Laertes, Polonius’s son. A returning, uniformed Marine, he is distant and almost catatonic, but in one unpredictable action, he leaves the audience anguished, and in another, applauding.
But in the race for the bottom of immorality, a yet unnamed but central character may take the prize – Juicy’s mother, Tedra, or Gertrude from Hamlet. A hedonist and opportunist, Tedra marries Rev (Claudius), making him head of the food business (king), before the deceased Pap's (King Hamlet’s) body is cold. And she blithely counsels Juicy to move on and accept Rev as his father. Her values come clear when she depletes Juicy’s college tuition money to pay for a bathroom renovation.
As Tedra, the comely Jenn Stephens is salacious, quick with a come-on smile and rotating hips – always ready to party and play games. But one game evinces her ire. To Rev’s and her displeasure, Juicy uses a game of charades to reveal unseemly truth about Rev.
Fat Ham is a comedy, and the laughs come continuously from a variety of sources and in a variety of different forms. But underpinning the comic elements are the tragedy of fratricide/regicide; the social issue of homosexuality; the matter of moral priorities; the poison of toxic masculinity; and considerations of deciding what kind of lives we wish for and what risks to take in attempting them. Making the serious crests work in an ocean of humor is a challenge. Whatever shocks or surprises arise are well absorbed by the narrative flow and the directorial management. The result is a highly entertaining moral tale that is more relatable than the source from which it is drawn.
Fat Ham written by James Ijames, is produced by San Francisco Playhouse and plays on its stage at 450 Post Street, San Francisco, CA through April 19, 2025.