As Told to - The Play's the Thing

Shakespeare's Hamlet has been endlessly adapted. Playwright James Ijames's fat ham turns the chilling tragedy into a riotous exploration of queerness.

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In May of this year, James Ijames won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Fat Ham, a bawdy, Black, funny, and unabashedly queer adaptation (of sorts) of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Set on a North Carolina pig farm, the play closely follows the beats of the famous tragedy but remixes them into a meditation on masculinity, sexuality, mourning, and joy. Juicy, the play's protagonist and Hamlet stand-in, is a fat Black queer boy who has just seen the ghost of his father, Pap. Pap has returned to earth for revenge: He claims that his brother, Juicy's uncle Rev, murdered him in order to marry his wife, Tedra, and visits Juicy on the afternoon of a cookout celebrating their union to demand Juicy kill Rev. Early in the play, Juicy turns to the audience and soliloquies, "Fathers and sons. That shit can get dark. / You know. / When the chemistry ain't right. When the father / Is too heavy and the son is too light. / When the father thinks the son is too light / When the son is too heavy. / That fucks shit up." It's a virtuoso moment that announces Ijames as not only a major talent but also, rarest of things, a writer who surprises his audience.