Review: FAT HAM at Portland Center Stage And Portland Playhouse

Confession time: I saw the original production of FAT HAM on Broadway, and I thought “meh.” Clearly, I just didn’t get it. Now, after seeing this stunning co-production between Portland Center Stage and Portland Playhouse, directed by Charles Grant, I finally understand.

James Ijames' Pulitzer Prize-winning play is in conversation with Hamlet – a riff on it, an argument with it, a loving rebuke of it. Familiarity with Shakespeare deepens the experience, but it’s certainly not a requirement. Either way, do yourself a favor and read dramaturg Kamilah Bush's program notes before the show. They give you everything you need.

Both plays begin the same way: a father is dead, a mother has remarried the uncle, and the father's ghost arrives demanding revenge. Then things start to diverge. Where Shakespeare gives us tragedy (grief, madness, the crushing weight of duty), Ijames asks a different question entirely. What if we just... stopped? What if we refused the cycle of violence and pain? What if, instead of revenge, we chose pleasure, authenticity, and the radical act of letting people be who they are?

FAT HAM unfolds at a backyard BBQ following the wedding. At the center of it all is Juicy, played with warmth and vulnerability by Isaiah Reynolds (last seen on this stage as Tobias in Sweeney Todd). Juicy is a queer young Black man who finds himself, like Hamlet, torn between obligation and self-preservation. He's grieving his father and also quietly relieved that he's gone. He just wants to finish his online degree in Human Resources and make a better life for himself. When his father's ghost appears and demands blood, Juicy is torn between family pressure and his own desire to break free of the patriarchal machinery of violence that has defined the men in his family.

You can see the all-encompassing nature of that violence in how Clinton Lowe plays both the dead father (Pap) and the uncle (Rev). Both men seem to fill every inch of available space, just as they have consumed so much of the family's emotional oxygen. The idea of softness is completely alien to men like this.

Jackie Davis is fabulous as Tedra, Juicy's mother, who knows her son is queer even though neither has named it aloud. She is simultaneously trying to shield him and unable to fully free herself from the gravitational pull of powerful, suffocating men.

The neighbors arrive for the party: Rabby (Treasure Lunan, perfectly cast), along with her children Opal (Ashlee Radney) and Larry (Austin Michael Young). Opal has been forced to wear a dress. Larry is in his military uniform. Neither of them wears their costume comfortably.

Rounding out the cast is Marcel M. Johansen as Tio, Juicy's perpetually high, philosophizing Best Friend. It is Tio who sees the possibility of a better future most clearly, perhaps because he is removed from reality in just the right way.

The production wraps all of this in a physical world that is simply gorgeous. Alexandra Meyer's flower-strewn set, Wanda Walden's vibrant costumes, and Erica Lauren Maholmes' colorful lighting design conspire to make the whole thing luminous.

At its heart, this is a show about the active, courageous choice to be vulnerable and find joy. Don’t miss it.

FAT HAM runs through May 17. Details and tickets here.