Reader Score
86%
86% of readers
recommend this book
Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, James Ijames' Fat Ham reinvents Shakespeare's masterpiece in startling and hilarious ways amidst the backdrop of a family barbecue in the American South.
Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Drama.
Juicy--a young, queer, Southern man, who is grappling with questions of identity--is visited by the ghost of his father (Pap) at his mother's wedding/family barbecue. Pap demands that Juicy avenge his recent murder. How will Juicy, a sensitive and self-aware young Black man, trying to break a cycle of trauma and toxic masculinity, avenge his father's premature death? Fat Ham reinvents Shakespeare's masterpiece in startling and hilarious ways amidst the backdrop of a family barbeque in the American South.
James IJames is a playwright, director, actor, and educator. Ijames was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Fat Ham. His other awards include a Pew Fellowship, the F. Otto Haas Award for Emerging Artist, the Terrence McNally New Play Award, a Whiting Award, a Kesselring Prize, and a Steinberg Prize. His other plays include The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington and White. He resides in South Philadelphia.
"James Ijames's outstanding transformation of Shakespeare's tragedy into a play about Black masculinity and queerness, both echoes Hamlet and finds a language beyond it . . . the effect is stunning, making the play a living text, moving between Hamlet, the story happening on the stage, and the world beyond the fourth wall." --Maya Phillips, The New York Times
"A fresh and vital force." --Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker
"A broad, buoyant comedy . . . James Ijames's riff on Hamlet is an unalloyed comedy pleasure." --Charles Isherwood, Wall Street Journal
"Hamlet said it first: 'What a piece of work.'" --Helen Shaw, Vulture
"Unabashedly entertaining . . . We need plays like Fat Ham." --Peter Marks, Washington Post