#Time Out NY

[writemarcus]

Playwright James Ijames on 'Fat Ham,' the spotlight on Black queerness and life after a Pulitzer

A Q&A with the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of 'Fat Ham.'

Written by Marcus Scott

Wednesday February 8 2023

James Ijames won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Fat Ham, an irreverent riff on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet that feels like a call to arms for Black joy and queer representation. A jambalaya of satire, magical realism and the American domestic sitcom, the play follows Juicy (Marcel Spears), a morose online-college student, as he tries to come to terms with the marriage of his newly-widowed mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), to his Machiavellian uncle Rev (Billy Eugene Jones). “This ain’t Shakespeare,” Ijames noted in the show’s program. “Don’t get me wrong. I love Shakespeare, this just ain’t him. This ain’t a tragedy…This play is offering tenderness next to softness as a practice of living. This play is celebrating Blackness that is traditional and weird and lonely and happy and grieving and honest and frightened and brave and sexy and churchified and liberated and poetic.”

Fat Ham had its world premiere in the spring of 2021 in a digital production by Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater. A year later, it made its onstage debut at the Public Theater, directed by Saheem Ali, and became one of the buzziest plays of the season. On March 21, 2023, that production will begin a limited run at Broadway’s American Airlines Theatre. We chatted over FaceTime with the playwright as he prepared to step into rehearsals.  

Fat Ham moves Hamlet from a medieval Danish castle to a modern-day cookout in North Carolina. Why a barbecue?

“Barbecues are cumulative spaces. It starts with a few people and then it grows. There’s food, and people are drinking. It’s a space of truth-telling, it’s a space of game-playing, it’s a space of intimacy and warmth—and it’s where secrets come out. My family recently came together for the Christmas holiday and a cousin of mine made an announcement about being pregnant. Everyone was just so excited and lifted by that; everyone’s energy turned towards them in this really beautiful way. I wanted a space where that sort of collective joy was possible and also where a big, messy argument was possible. Where a fight was possible, where drinking was possible, where eating was possible, where romance was possible. In Shakespearean comedies, when you go outside or into the woods—like the forest of Arden [in As You Like It] or the forest in Midsummer—it’s a space where anything’s possible. There’s magic. We’re not inside, in a cold room in a cold castle. We’re outside: We have decorations, we’re colorfully dressed. We are in the sort of space where magic is palpable and possible.”

Juicy is not your typical Hamlet. He is Black and Southern and, as you describe him in the play, “thicc.” What was the motivation behind that?

“Well, I’m Black and from the South, and that drove my desire to play with people that sound and look like me. When you see productions of Hamlet, he's usually white and sort of athletic. I wanted to make a version of this play that was open to a body type that wasn't that; I'm a person who, for pretty much my whole life, has had some struggle with my weight and my perception of what I look like and how I feel in my body. And another thing I wanted to do was to explore Blackness in the South in a way that felt contemporary, that didn't feel held by history—looking at Southern communities right now as opposed to a nostalgic imagination of the Black South.”

Why did you choose for Juicy to have a passion to study Human Resources in college?

“Human Resources is about care and workflow. Efficiency. I wanted Juicy to have a passion for something that felt antithetical to his father. He wants to make sure people are okay.”

How does that contrast reflect other things about the way you have approached Shakespeare’s story?

“I think the play is exploring multiple modalities of masculinity. We see a lot of different kinds of Black masculinity on the stage. We see Juicy, we see Tio, we see Larry, we see Pap and Rev. And there’s a masculinity that’s implied about the community that they live in, that is sort of present in the room. I wanted to show that masculinity is not monolithic—it’s not as simple or cut-and-dried as it’s often depicted. I also wanted to explore cycles of trauma and violence in families. I’m interested in primordial stories, stories that no matter what culture you walk into, there’s like a version of them. I always think of Hamlet as—and I don't know that a lot of people think of it this way—but I think of Hamlet as a Cain and Abel story: the story of a sibling killing their sibling to get ahead. Anybody can relate to that; that’s a [narrative] that you inherit and moves with you through generations. And the younger folks in the play have to make some decisions about whether or not they want to continue that, whether that’s what they want their lives to look like and their relationships to each other to look like. I’m calling into question the stories that we’ve been passed down as wisdom. Because sometimes it’s wisdom, but more and more I look at those stories as cautionary tales of what you shouldn’t do. Vengeance isn’t gonna help Juicy. Killing his uncle is not gonna help Juicy’s life get any better.”

Your breakthrough play was Kill Move Paradise in 2017. How do you think you've changed as a writer since then?

“Oh, gosh. When I look at Kill Move Paradise, that play is quite erratic, you know [he laughs]. I always describe it as the way that I try to metabolize my anger and my fear and anxiety about being a Black body driving around in America, walking around in America, just trying to live my life. And so it has that anxiety in it. It has that fear and nervousness in it. It’s in the text, you can feel it on the page. As I've gotten a little older, I've experienced more and I've written more—the more you write, the better writer you become. I'm more intentional with story, with plot; how I'm weaving a theme or a theory into the action of a play is a bit more sophisticated than it was when I was starting out. The anger is usually shrouded in rebellion or exuberance. At a point in my life, anger sort of dragged me down into a space of high-blood-pressure fury. But I think now the work offers people an invitation to metabolize anger in a different way. By the time we get to the end of Fat Ham, people are dancing in the aisle.”

They certainly are.

“And that is not to negate the fact that we’ve just watched the thing that had pain in it, that had trauma in it, that had violence in it. But just because you’ve been through difficulty doesn’t consign you for the rest of your life to difficulty, to trauma, to pain. We have access to joy, we have access to resilience, we have access to exuberant ecstasy. Black history, in this country in particular, teaches us that: The blues and jazz and hip-hop come out of extraordinary awful scenarios and settings. Those art forms are undeniably both Black, but undeniably exuberant, resilient, unabashed, queer—all of those things! They possess all of those things. When I sit down to write a play, I know that at the end I have to send people out into the world, into the streets, into workplaces, into homes. My hope is that I’m leading them to some hope.”

This play is pretty fantastical, and there are various displays of spectacle and magic. There are also a panoply of images and homages to the Pan-African cultural experience—allusions to Louisiana Voodoo as well as Central African, Creole and Haitian Hoodoo symbology.

“Ghosts are a feature in a lot of my plays. Magic is a feature in a lot of my plays. Because I’m a person who grew up with people who kind of had magical ways of thinking. I grew up Baptist: hardcore, every Sunday, sang in the choir, youth ministry, youth usher—like, I am a church gay! I also grew up in a family that has New Year’s Eve traditions that they do, and will throw salt over their shoulder, or say “Don’t sweep over a single man’s shoe because he won’t get married.” That sort of Hoodoo connection to the spirit world and connection to ancestors was also a big part of the family that I grew up in. And so magic in that respect feels very real to me. Ancestors feel very present—the reverence for people who have passed on is immense. So, to me, the ghost of Juicy’s father showing up isn’t just a specter from this other world that is coming with caution and with information. Juicy is having a conversation with his ancestor and he talks to his ancestor, the way that I talk to mine. The thinness of that veil between here and there—I relish in that, and the theatrical allows you to do that with a lot of ease. I didn’t want the ghost to be a joke. He’s funny—that cat is extremely funny—but he also has these great moments of, like, “Wow, I really messed you up.”  

There is a long literary tradition of Black writers explaining Blackness to people who aren’t Black. You don’t do that here. In fact, this play comments on performing Blackness, trauma porn and “enterpainment” on stage—and it’s done with humor. Why was this important to you?

“Humor is powerful. It opens us up to hearing things in a new way. It’s a big part of all of my plays. The question about explaining Blackness is huge to me. I don’t feel like I have to explain Blackness to an audience. I’m assuming that everyone will catch up who doesn’t understand.”

At the end of the show, there’s a cover of the funky dance-pop disco tune “Kill The Lights” sung by Broadway actor Mykal Kilgore. What inspired that particular needle drop?

“I love disco music, just personally. Anybody can dance to it. If you are off-rhythm, you will be on a rhythm with disco music because it’s four-on-the-floor and is just all-encompassing. It strives for ecstasy, it strives for moving from a passage from one state to another. Probably because they were all like using drugs and having sex while they were listening to it in the Seventies and Eighties. But this is a contemporary artist singing in the disco style. It’s not a song from the era. It just moves people! That music moves people.”

If you were to classify your previous plays by genre, with Fat Ham being disco, what would your other shows be?

“Ooh.” [He laughs.] “I think Kill Move Paradise, if I had to put a genre to it, it’s Southern hip-hop, right? It’s sort of grounded in that culture. I would say White is like pop music—it’s like my Ariana Grande album. And Miz Martha is Americana music. It’s like bluegrass with a trap beat.”

Only nine writers of Black descent have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in its 105-year history: Charles Gordone for No Place to Be Somebody, Charles Fuller for A Soldier’s Play, August Wilson for Fences and The Piano Lesson, Suzan-Lori Parks for Topdog/Underdog, Lynn Nottage for Ruined and Sweat, and the last four prizes in a row—Jackie Sibblies Drury for Fairview in 2019, Michael R. Jackson for A Strange Loop in 2020, Katori Hall for The Hot Wing King in 2021 and now you. Is something going on in the zeitgeist? Is there something special about Black writers that make their work more urgent right now?

“I think a few things are happening. Black writers and Black directors have been trying to push the form in new directions, to be both in conversation with the cannon and also pushing against the cannon. Those four plays—starting with Fairview and going to A Strange Loop, The Hot Wing King and Fat Ham—all four of those plays are actively doing those things. And so are some plays that haven’t won Pulitzers but have been defining culturally, like Slave Play and things like KPOP. The audience for that work is already there and primed, and it’s just waiting for someone to make art for them, you know what I'm saying? People are curious about what is possible in the form. I remember seeing Fairview and just being blown away by the audacity of it. It made me want to be more ambitious—to create more of a social experiment with my work in collaboration with an audience. I think the same thing is true of A Strange Loop and Hot Wing King in terms of those plays’ exploration of Black queer identity. And that flows rather beautifully into Fat Ham, which is doing the same sort of thing by taking a play that people cherish like Hamlet and saying, ’Not only is this mine, it’s mine in these particular ways, and this is what I’m gonna keep and this is what I’m gonna discard.’ So some of it is just us, as writers, wanting the form to feel as vital and as urgent as possible. And one way to do that is to examine how we write things and try to find new ways into storytelling.”

Those last three plays in particular have centered on Black queerness, and on what we might call radical softness. Is there something in the ether? Was there something in the culture that made us say, “Now that’s something we need to address, to attack, to appraise?” Because it all kind of happened around the same time.

“Hmm. I don’t know. That stretch of plays spanned the heartiest points of the pandemic, and we were all quite hungry for connection, closeness, touch, tenderness. And that offered an opportunity for people to be excited about seeing something that felt soft or vulnerable. I think people respond to that because we want to be better. Culturally, I think, we want to try to do things differently. It remains to be seen whether or not that will continue, but people wanted to engage with things that felt tender, that felt connective, and all of those plays are great examples of that. And I think that’s also true of Fairview; with the separation that it is asking for, it’s asking for people to sit in an embodied space with an idea.”

Last question: How has your life changed post-Pulitzer? Has that changed how people think of you and your work? Or how you think of yourself and your work?

“Oh my gosh! It’s just made my life so much busier, but it’s also made me focus on the work. Refocus on my craft and my practice. I don’t want this prize to freeze me in time. I want to keep pushing and keep expanding what I do.”

Fat Ham begins previews at the American Airlines Theatre on March 21, 2023, and opens on April 12. Tickets are available here. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Follow Marcus Scott on Instagram:@therealmarcusscott

Marcus Scott

[sacredfolly-blog]

Ululation Elation and Dash Five

Ululation Elation and Dash Five

Suspended in Sound I’ve been working really hard to learn five songs with Kit Krash for an upcoming show in the next couple of days. It seems like this is how we work, nothing slow and steady. It’s a real brain bender to do it this way – and it’s good. I love the immersion. Though, it means I almost have to drop everything else – I have to make time for paid work, meals, relationships.  I wish it…

[emblazons]

"If you touch her again, I will kill you. Again."

STRANGER THINGS SANS VISAGES S04E09 - The Piggyback (Part I of II)

[stardink]

'Won't you stay with me, my darling

When this house don't feel like home?'

Island king au by @pillowspace

[suntails]

fallen

[tangled-wires-and-a-dead-heart]

"we're going to die together! Isn't that a lovely treat! I wonder how long it'll take. Maybe I'll get to watch the worms lick your bones clean."

"kill me then, if you hate me so much. Just get it over with."

"that sounds...nice. I'm so tired of the bad blood between us, but it's hard to let it go. You've hurt me....and I've also hurt you."

[fionaapplerocks]

Fiona Apple, Time Out NY cover

[uniiiquehecrt]

Voice actors are NOT the same as actors.

It takes a specific kind of skill-set and training to be able to warp and meld the voice. It takes a certain kind of talent and dedication to hone that talent into the ability to meld the voice and invoke emotion with one's voice alone. Actors are used to using their voice secondarily to their body language and their facial expressions. It's all mirrored back on camera. They do have nuance. But it's a different kind of nuance and a different kind of training to produce that nuance.

Voice actors might get their likeness transposed on their character's design, and maybe their mannerisms might seep into the character's animation. But when it's all said and done: their presence is in their voice. They are bringing a character to life, showing that emotion in their voice, trying to keep a specific accent, drawl, pitch, tone in that voice and keep it consistent for their recording sessions.

The voice actor is like a classically trained musician who can play first chair in a competitive, world-renown orchestra. The actor (who fills the voice actor's role) is like a moot who played violin in beginner and intermediate high school orchestra and thinks they can get into Juilliard with that 2-4 years of experience.

This doesn't mean that the HS orchestra moot can't play. They can even be really good at it. Maybe they won competitions and sat first chair. But they are not in the same league as the person who's been training their whole lives and lives and breathes to hone their craft using the instrument and all of the training they've ever acquired to perfect it. They are not meant for the same roles. They are not in the same caliber. You do not hire the HS equivalent when you want to play complex music in a competitive orchestra.

Actors are not the same as voice actors.

And furthermore, actors - especially big name actors - taking the roles of animated characters for big budget films or TV pilots makes no sense anyways when - at least in the case of TV pilots - there's not a point to hiring a big budget actors anyways. That money could be used elsewhere (like paying your animators), and the talent that is brought onto the screen for X character could then be hired on to voice said character no recasting required.

I wouldn't say voice acting as a profession is in danger exactly, but it's certainly being disrespected and overlooked for celebrity clout, and this has ALWAYS been an issue. Shoot, even Robin Williams knew that much - which is why he tried so hard not to be used as a marketing chess piece for Aladdin and got royally pissed off when it happened anyways. People shouldn't go to any movie (but especially not animated films) because "oh famous actor is in it". People should go because it's a good movie and the voice acting is good.

People who honest to god think that voice actors are replaceable because "oh well anyone can voice act" or "I like xyz celebrity so naturally it'll be good" ... Honestly I just wish you'd reassess your priorities because you're missing the point and are part of the problem.

Voice Actors ≠ Actors.

[meidui]

"he loved her to the point of invention" but it's tony building steve his first pair of gloves with electromagnetic panels on them so his shield comes back to him more easily

[ace-of-d1am0nds]

WHY DOES THE WORLD OF DARKNESS HAVE SO MUCH LORE???? HOW DOES IT HAVE SO MUCH LORE????? WHO IS WRITING ALL OF THIS FUCKING LORE???? HOLY SHIT IM GONNA LOSE MY MIND

[skitskatdacat63]

2024 Chinese Grand Prix - Sprint Quali - Fernando Alonso

[svtskneecaps]

also in terms of the bolas playlist it's fascinating to me that the songs added by each person have a slight tendency to represent a consistent aspect of bolas

like

the songs added by slime are their chaos

the songs added by philza are their rebellion

the songs added by cellbit are their rage

the songs added by baghera are their anguish

it's so fucking FASCINATING TO ME but i don't know enough music theory to elaborate lmfao this is Vibes Only

(mouse's songs i can't boil down to an easy noun which is why they aren't mentioned lmao anyway they go hard asf)

(also i went on the longest fucking unhinged elaboration in the tags lmfao i almost didn't have enough tags left to tag "long tags" at the end

(i could have even gone on longer in terms of where their characters were at entering purgatory [philza: cage for a cage; cellbit: fed worker murders; baghera: her past as a federation experiment; slime: turning into a code because of the code pretending to be his daughter] but i ran out of space and also time it's 4AM AAAAA)

[im-smart-i-swear]

can you remember being born? were you born at all

[karda]

i wish i could be the kind of person that just goes out to have fun ..bar or event or something. but unfortunately i am plagued with the illness (fear)

[vykodlak]

The funniest thing about taking risks in art is that there is basically no penalty for you if it goes wrong besides a bruised ego. I will wrestle my shit brain into submission and take more risks this year

[teenytraveler]

Happy New Year 2024! ✨

Best wishes from Anya and her lil bro Jamie 🥹🫶

A bit belated but I wanted it to be the first drawing of this year!!

You can see the scrapped version (which I didn't end up going for simply bc of the lack of time) under the cut