Fat Ham (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by James Ijames

Overview

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.

Finalist for 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636701684
Publisher:	Theatre Communications Group
Publication date:	08/01/2023
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	81,689
Product dimensions:	8.30(w) x 5.30(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

 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.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher