Review: FAT HAM Serves Cookout Chaos Realness at City Theatre

James Ijames's Pulitzer-winning comedy Fat Ham is less an adaptation or reimagining of Hamlet, and more a play ABOUT Hamlet, a response to Hamlet. The characters are all too aware of how their stories and behaviors are mirroring characters from Shakespeare's tragedy: they quote it, riff on it, confirm or refute its influence on them. But this makes the play feel way more intellectual and metatheatrical than it actually plays onstage. Tom Stoppard, this is not. It's an R-rated, bawdy and truly anything-goes comedy that surprises around every turn. This is the kind of show that starts with Pornhub and ends with a call-and-response dance party. Shakespeare would be more than proud, he'd be dancing along at the end.

Directed by Monteze Freeland, in a nineties-colored Fresh Prince visual aesthetic from costumer Alexis Carrie and set designer Sasha Schwartz, the show leads you into its loopy sitcom vibes from the start. The show's tone starts out lighter than air, even genuinely farcical, though the second half swings between that magic-realist silliness and some genuine moments of heaviness and heart. This is a show where anything can happen, and everything does: there is metatheatrical fourth-wall breaking, there is karaoke, there is elaborate lip-syncing, there is stand-up comedy and there is slapstick, all interspersed with modernist prose poetry and iambic pentameter. It's at rip, and you just have to take it.

At a backyard wedding reception barbecue, queer college student Juicy (Brandon Foxworth) is in a bit of a mood. Maybe it's because his cheerfully hypersexual mother Tedra (Maria Becoates-Bey) is marrying aging player Rev (Khalil Kain). Maybe it's because Juicy's father, Rev's brother Pap (also Khalil Kain) just got shanked in prison and is now appearing to him as a ghost, urging him to kill Pap. Or maybe it's just because he's fat, black and queer in a world that makes it uncomfortable or lethal to be any of those things, let alone all three. The pressure to act or explode mounts as the guests arrive for the wedding party: flamboyant church lady Rabby (Linda Haston), tomboy-experimenting-with-butchness Opal (Elexa Lindsay Hanner), stoner Tio (Jordan Williams) and quiet, upright soldier Larry (LaTrea Rembert). Chaos quickly ensues, and lots of it.

The play's title Fat Ham is a triple entendre: it refers to a literal smoked meat, a play on Hamlet, and a large and melodramatic performer. In the pseudo-title role, Brandon Foxworth's performance is a lot less hammy, and a lot more subtle, than the title would imply. Despite his character being semi-openly queer, Foxworth often plays the straight man when contrasted with the more cartoonish characters surrounding him. Foxworth moves gamely through the various subgenres within the show, and is as adept at sitcom farce as he is at Shakespearean drama. Khalil Kain and Maria Becoates-Bey get all the hamminess themselves, joyfully chewing scenery as Juicy's various parental figures that only rarely touch base in the realism-oriented end of the pool. LaTrea Rembert's wonderfully controlled and mannered Larry, who mourns for the softnesss life and masculinity and the military have ground out of him, bridges the gap between the comic farce and Shakespearean tragedy with a wonderfully lyrical interlude. His shared moments with Juicy induce laughs, gasps and shock in equal measures. Even the secondary characters have intense moments to shine: Elexa Lindsay Hanner's down-to-earth, libidinal Opal speaks truth one moment and joyfully plays the fool the next, while Linda Haston's Rabby milks the "big hat church lady" aesthetic to the hilt, like she's stepped straight out of the supporting cast on Abbott Elementary. As for Jordan Williams? I'm not going to tell you what he does, or what his big monologue centers on. I'll merely say it is as beautiful as it is absurd, as philosophical as it is pornographic.

There's never been a play like Fat Ham. The closest analogue I can think of is Hair, for its similar twisting and contorting of theatrical genres and conventions. Fat Ham is a trip, almost literally with the psychedelic and surrealist turns it takes throughout. And like any good trip, all you can do is take it, and enjoy it. 

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